I'm doing a course on Leadership at work. I rate this course to be 19 crumbed onion rings and I'm quite happy for the opportunity. The course is not really a single structured course. It is instead an amalgamation of several courses, some from Linked-In Learning, others with a specific facilitator teaching some specific (or unspecific) skill. For fun, I want to do some reflective practice on this because reflective practice is keen.
The Leadership Course Game
I have now done at least 5 different courses on Leadership. A lot of the content in these courses is intuitive, not novel, or shared with some other book or course I have looked at in the past. With complete honesty, I get bored. It gets hard to focus on the content. In order to focus, I have begun to play a game. It's called the, "What does this course value?" game.
The way you play is simple. Try and figure out the core value system of the particular course, so that you can predict the specific behaviours and content that they will be teaching you.
This game is fun, at least for me as courses often have surprisingly different and interesting value systems. It's fun to guess that the value systems. Some of the below are my guesses for some of the courses I've done:
- I want an easy life selling Cognitive Behaviour Therapy courses to corporations
- I think that if you look after everybody's ego's you'll get more out of them
- I think that employees should be loyal to their boss, and tactics for taking advantage that loyalty are just fine
- "I've got mine" but also look after your subordinates
- Being true to yourself is important, but so is compromise
- Logic is the best, and if you do it right, you can solve any problem
I won't say which ones, because some of these are rude and cynical. Also, weirder guesses makes for more fun.
Try it out. What motivated the person writing the course? Was it status? Mastery? Are are they trying to take money, or are they pained by some horrid thing and they feel compelled to teach it out of existence. Or are they not really sure what they're doing, and drawing on a mish-mash of idea's that they saw once?
The most important thing is that if you think you are winning this game, is not to feel smugly superior. Whilst feeling smugly superior may be great in the short term, it will backfire when it turns out that you were wrong.
No, the purpose of this game (other than having fun), is to explore the intersection between the values that they hold, and the behaviours that they are asking from you.
The behaviours that they are asking from you
So it turns out that the content of almost every Leadership course consists of a list of behaviours that they think you should follow. These behaviours will stem from, "What questions are you allowed to ask you team?" to, "How do you confront someone in a way that minimises trouble for you?". Commonly underpinning of all of these leadership courses are that these set of behaviours are an implicit manifestation of some values system that the course wants to impose upon attendees.
That is, the course wants the attendee's to assume their value system via exemplification. First attendee's will emulate the behaviours in the course and then the expectation is that they will see the merit of the value system the course is selling because of the effectiveness of the behaviours.
Interestingly, this is exactly how religious institutions indoctrinate children. That is, they have children participate in ritualistic behaviours, and eventually they decide to adopt the value system/identity that justifies these behaviours.
The flaw in this teaching style, is it presupposes that the course is teaching effective behaviours, cook-book style, when that may or may not be the case. The advantage is that it means you actually can teach behaviour without first establishing some complex, evidence-based model for how people behave or ought to behave. For example the course need not be built upon the back of a religion, psychology or philosophy degree.
Due to this flaw, each course is on its own is incoherent, unless you agree with the cultural values that it is based upon.
The relationship between leadership and values
I hold a belief that there is an important relationship between leadership and values. The reasoning behind this is like so:
In order to lead someone, they need to value something that will be within their power by following you. In a business setting, that's money. Other times, it's improvement in some skill, belonging to a community, a reprieve from existential dread, the chance for recognition and status, or one of many other ego-driven needs.
A slightly long arrow from this is, the most effective leader will be one that is able to influence the values of their followers in order to align them with the leaders goals. With this ability, a leader should be able to pull together highly motivated people, and highly motivated people can be highly effective.
But there is one glaring problem with this. How does one go about influencing the values of other people? This is certainly not something that I have seen in a course before. That is to say, most leadership courses are not leadership courses at all.
They teach management.