American View: Is a Lecture More or Less Effective at Teaching Leadership Than a Reasoned Conclusion?

Management

I’m not a fan of big commercial leadership training “events.” I know, I know … I write about leadership theory and practice, so I ought to be in favour of them. Heck, if I was smart, I’d probably be cashing in on the racket, converting my leadership columns from American View to multimedia presos. Get a piece of that multi-million quid edutainment profit stream!

It’s just … no. Even if I could somehow steer clear of the dodgy characters who seem to dominate the sector, I strongly believe that the top “trainers” in this industry are charging far too much for nowhere near enough value. In many cases, their customers are paying for insights that they could easily come up with themselves without spending a cent.

You’re welcome to disagree; I’m sure the megastars making bank with these programmes will vehemently argue that I just don’t “get it” or that I have some “hidden agenda” informing my criticism. Neither assertion is true, although I’ll grant that I am biased: that is, I think that valuable leadership lessons and insights are all around us, free for the taking. We just fail to learn them and make them work for us. The question, though, is why that happens.

I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot this spring. This time last year, my father degraded from a healthy, athletic, and manically active 83-year-old to a frail shell of a man, unable to stand on his own, to recognize his own family, and finally to speak at all. He died on the morning 18th June 2023, surrounded by friends, family, and loyal former employees. It was … horrible.

Ever since my father’s “celebration of life” ceremony last summer, I’ve been mulling over my personal stories about him that I’d cut from the final script. It’s not like I possessed a secret book of awful family secrets that would shock and horrify Dad’s friends and admirers. Nothing so melodramatic. My father was, in more ways than I can express, a legitimate Great Man™. He helped thousands of children, special needs folks. and wounded squaddies during his life though his physical therapy research. We were proud of him and everything he accomplished.

That said, my father and I always had a rather distant relationship. It wasn’t due to any lack of parental affection. Rather, it appeared to be a natural consequence of the times we lived in.

That said, I guarantee that leaded gasoline and having everyone smoke everywhere, all the time, must have played some part.

My parents were born at the end of the Silent Generation. ^[1] As such, my sister and I were early Gen-Xers. ^[2] We were also bog-standard “latchkey kids.” Our parents both worked, so my sister and I often got ourselves to and from school. I’d come home to an empty house, let myself in, and either do homework or watch TV until everyone else trickled in. Our mother would arrive first since her job was closest, then work her own projects upstairs. Dad would come home late and go straight to his office in the basement where he’d smoke, write music, read, and think. He would usually emerge around 10 pm to watch the nightly news … and send us kids to bed.

From what I saw, our family life was normal for the era. Almost all the kids I knew had two working parents who weren’t involved in their kids’ lives. Social media likes to paint us as the “feral generation” and that’s not much of an exaggeration. There was no Internet yet, so most of us simply binged television, radio, and books for something to do or made up our own activities. The silence of an empty house made it easier to read in peace, explore creative arts, or just stare into nothingness and This isn’t meant to come across as whinging. I don’t recall any of us feeling “abandoned” or “abused” … it was simply How Things Are™ back in the 1980s.

I only ever considered our situation detrimental when I tried to get my father ionvolved in what I was interested in. In 1982, my cousin John got the Dungeons & Dragons “red box” basic set. For the rest of that summer, he and I taught ourselves to play the game. I asked my folks for the box set for Christmas and – lucky me! – got it. Excited, I asked my father to learn how to play it with us over Christmas break. He agreed, so I showed him the example adventure. Rather than ask how the game was supposed to be played or, you know, read the bloody book, my father got frustrated and quit. Our one attempt to bond through tabletop RPG gaming lasted maybe three minutes, total. He never asked about it after that.

Here’s why I feel that’s relevant to this article’s opening premise: I owned that D&D boxed set. The rulebook was only 64 pages long. My father could have borrowed it and read it in an hour at any time. He was supremely intelligent and knew how to tell stories creatively thanks to his years of composing music. He could have met me halfway and taken an interest. He could have carved out an hour and asked me to explain it. He could have … and didn’t. I always wondered why.

I thought a lot about that when I became a father myself ten years later. I vowed that I would take a respectful interest in my kids’ interests. I watched the shows they liked and asked them why they liked them. I read my favourite books to my kids and read their favourites in turn so we could discuss them together. I taught my kids how to play the games I liked and learned to play the games they and their friends were interested in in turn just so we could have something in common to talk about that validated their interests and choices.

Plus, it’s a hell of a lot safer than going to school in Texas … or to the store … or to a mall … or to church … or out to eat in a state where random mass shootings are deemed acceptable by the powers-that-be.

That parental experience, in turn, later helped improve my leadership skills as a supervisor. Specifically, it helped me forge stronger professional relationships with my people. We couldn’t play D&D together, ^[3] but I could and did ask each worker about what interested them. What were their hobbies? Their favourite stories? What were they interested in doing with their life besides work?

My efforts paid off. I confirmed my hypothesis that validating other people’s interests – even when what they do is something I would never be interested in myself – demonstrated empathy and respect. Taking a genuine interest in the whole person helped me to establish and maintain a rapport that, in turn, lead to greater trust and esprit de corps.

As leadership lessons go, this one should be self-evident. I’m always taken aback when some snooty MBA opines that management types should treat their workers like emotionless robots. To remain distant; to prevent empathy, sympathy, or personal bias to interfere with extracting the maximum possible amount of surplus labour value from one’s serfs.

What’s flabbergasting to me is that “heartless MBA” drek is exactly the sort of counterproductive “lesson” that I’ve heard countless times from HR “professionals” and high-dollar trainers. The people who are supposedly so good at leadership that their advice is worth paying for. How on earth did these self-proclaimed “experts” get qualified to vomit such destructive and vapid nonsense for a living? It never made sense until I had a long, silent spell waiting to board an airplane this time last year and had some uninterrupted time to mull over the problem.

Specifically, I was reflecting on my own disappointing failure to connect with my father growing up and how his rapidly deteriorating memory would make it impossible for us to every rectify that failure. I was heartened that I’d done better connecting with my own kids but that didn’t make up for the loss of what we could have shared. This wasn’t a religious epiphany or any such thing; it was just basic introspection. Experience + consideration = insight.

I’m not arguing that big budget conventions don’t have value; they certainly can. I’ve been to my fair share of them. What I object to is the rapid-fire one-way delivery of information that doesn’t allow for clarification, challenge, or elaboration. Most of these events seem more like performance art than “training.”

It was that last bit that connected for me. I realized that many of the people I’ve known who eagerly invested their time and money in big razzle-dazzle leadership events had a specific quality in common: they lacked either the intertest or the ability to engage in deliberate introspection. The lessons that these people needed to learn were often right there in their own personal histories, just waiting to be dissected … but these were folks who would rather hear their own lessons-learned sold back to them by a celebrity.

That preference struck me of a waste of time, money, and attention. Why pay someone else to tell you what you already know? Sitting in the departure lounge, staring out at the empty tarmac where my plane should be, I came to the conclusion that just as my father could have read my old D&D rulebook and thereby forged a stronger connection with me back in the day, many of my colleagues could have extracted valuable leadership lessons from their own lived experiences if only they’d invested some time to sit quietly and think through why things hadn’t worked out.

To be absolutely clear, I am not suggesting that such people are ignorant, stupid, or somehow damaged. Most people are, I think, perfectly capable of engaging in introspection; they choose not to for their own reasons. Part of that choice may be due to formative experiences in childhood. My father wrote in his autobiography that he’d cherished his high school and college summers when he could just think in peace while driving the tractor on his uncle’s farm. In retrospect, my sister and I appreciated that we had hundreds of hours of peaceful silence growing up to do the same. All that time spent living inside our own heads growing up made us comfortable returning there when presented with and mentally chew on a conundrum.

I wonder, though, if my friends and colleagues who prefer to get their insights from others – wisdom they likely already possess! – are doing themselves a disservice. So long as they learn a useful lesson, does it really matter how and where they learned it?

I’m inclined to say “yes,” but I realize that I’m biased. My research into cognitive science had left me with the impression that coming to a conclusion on one’s own is more likely to “stick” and result in long term positive behaviour change than the same message received from someone else. Introspection, then, seems like it should be the superior route to epiphany. The thing is, I can’t say for sure since I can’t experience the world from anyone else’s gestalt perspective. We’re all trapped in our own skulls, struggling to make sense of the world.

This is exactly the sort of topic that I used to like to discuss with my father on the rare occasions we reconnected. I’m sure we would’ve had a fiery and constructive debate. Unfortunately, that’s no longer an option.

^[1] Children born between 1923 and 1945, per the Pew Research Center.
^[2] Children born between 1965 and 1980, also per the PRC.
^[3] What a waste of potential. I’d wager that a regular weekly TTRPG game after work would raise morale far better than an ice cream party in the break room.