In absence of leadership, the tool firms use to solve coordination problems is management. A leader from this perspective is simply a better manager. Better at all the tasks of coordinating human activity, reading when people are feeling down, better at inspiring them, better at breaking apart complex tasks into routine ones that the ICs can more easily understand.
But leaders are practically impossible to reliably hire at rates the business owner can realistically afford, and if the whole zeitgeist of business starts paying more for effective leadership, then that just makes the problem a hundred times worse.
Leadership isn't teachable, but management is. Learning management will teach you the rudimentary skills of coordinating people to accomplish a goal, but it won't by itself make you a leader.
Firms can hire more managers, that solves the problem, I call a team with more than one competent manager, 'well-managed'. But good managers, like good leaders, wind up getting overworked across projects and so they just miss things. A leader doesn't miss anything, they're laser focused on the overall business goals of the project.
I agree that leadership isn’t “teachable” in the same sense that a skill or piece of knowledge is. But it can be supported and cultivated. It’s what I do for a living as a leadership coach. I don’t actually instruct anyone how to lead, but rather give them them the opportunity to discover it for themselves. I’ve seen pretty meaningful shifts for people on the timescale of 3-6 months.
Leadership is very teachable. The military and other large organizations that need leadership that can't be gotten off the street invest in it.
Few orgs want to teach it because it costs money and the ROI is poor if the subject jumps ship. The military doesn't have this problem to the same degree for obvious reasons, but for companies that require common skill sets, it's a tough decision.
It depends what you mean teachable. When a leader is when faced with a serious challenge, the crux of great leadership is being able to set one’s own ego aside and act from a place of groundedness and a clear and objective view of reality.
When human beings are in a difficult situation they all too often try to comfort themselves by seeking praise/affirmation, stability/safety, connection/relationship, etc. And in those moments we see everyone around us as a means to the end of getting one of those things that we feel is missing for us. Our ego _is_ our personality. We’re fused with it and most of the time aren’t even aware that we have these impulses.
Great leaders are the ones who develop an awareness of their inner world and are able to set it aside when they need to act.
Can you teach this? Sort of. There are people who do. You can call what people like me do as a kind of teaching. But it requires someone more than just instruction and practice. The person doing the “learning” has to be willing to let go of parts of themselves that had been with them for most of their life.
I’ve found mere desire to be a better leader is not enough. People’s psychology is riddled with land mines and powerful defense that won’t let them abandon a deeply held belief just because someone taught them that it was somehow counterproductive.
The people that make the leap are usually feeling “stuck” or having some kind of recurring breakdown that they just can’t bear anymore and don’t know what else to do.
People join the military for much different reasons than they join a corporation, reasons that generally mean they're going to choose to stay over leaving when the time comes.
Support and cultivation are orthogonal to the goal of maintaining a competitive edge. Ultimately, it means you're running a different kind of enterprise.
Which would be great and all, but there's less money in those sorts of things so the market can't support as many of them.
But leaders are practically impossible to reliably hire at rates the business owner can realistically afford, and if the whole zeitgeist of business starts paying more for effective leadership, then that just makes the problem a hundred times worse.
Leadership isn't teachable, but management is. Learning management will teach you the rudimentary skills of coordinating people to accomplish a goal, but it won't by itself make you a leader.
Firms can hire more managers, that solves the problem, I call a team with more than one competent manager, 'well-managed'. But good managers, like good leaders, wind up getting overworked across projects and so they just miss things. A leader doesn't miss anything, they're laser focused on the overall business goals of the project.