Why leadership training fails and the fail-safe solution for it

Posted on August 24, 2020 by Tushar Vakil, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

The statistics on the effectiveness of leadership training and executive education programs are both shocking and depressing! Despite a plethora of executive education and leadership training programs and many consultants offering them, most executive education and leadership development programs are a waste of time and money! Why does leadership training fail? Because there is a fundamental problem with them! Read on to find out what this problem is and how to fix it.

Why leadership training fails and the fail-safe solution for it

Executive education and leadership development programs have a fundamental problem. What is it? They often assume that leadership knowing equals leadership doing! Unfortunately, knowing is not the same as doing! Neither in life nor in leadership. We know a lot of things, but we only consistently do a minuscule of the things we know!

Let me give you an example that I often use in my training sessions to drive home this point. “How many of you have attempted to lose a few pounds?” Often many people raise their hands when I ask this question. During adulthood, most of us have put on a few extra pounds that we want to shed.

Then I ask – “Do you have any suggestions for me to lose a few pounds around my waist?” And I get a lot of suggestions like – eat more fruits, more raw vegetables, cut down on sugar, exercise more, eat mindfully, join a gym, take the stairs instead of the elevator, walk 10,000 steps daily and on and on. Most of them are usually very good and useful suggestions. I then say – “Thank you for the lovely and useful suggestions!”. My next question is – “How many of you consistently implement one or more of these suggestions regularly?” Very few people raise their hands in answer to this question! Knowing how to lose weight is not the same as being able to do it consistently enough to get the desired outcome.

More diet books sold than ever, yet more Americans are obese than ever!

There is high awareness amongst Americans about weight loss. Diet books are popular and are often on the list of best-selling books. Americans are buying more and more diet books than ever, and yet there are more obese people in America today than ever! People simply do not lose weight by reading a diet book!

Leadership is no different. The fundamentally flawed assumption in leadership training and executive education programs is that attending a course for a few days and knowing about some leadership skills and tools will translate into job leadership behavior change. Unfortunately, leadership development doesn’t happen this way.

“Leadership awareness may happen in a training program – leadership development occurs when a leader is at her work, interacting with her team! “ – Tushar Vakil

We should approach leadership development like a fitness regime and fix why leadership training fails

We should approach leadership development like a fitness regime. If we want to get fit, a one week routine at the gym once or twice a year, just doesn’t work! We need to work out regularly, probably daily. The exercise routine should be customized based on our individual needs and not a standard curriculum of one size fits all. Our diet regime should be designed similarly. Despite the help and despite the good intentions, we will fail to go to the gym. Failing, dusting ourselves off, and getting “back on the wagon” should be part of the design of the fitness routine and shouldn’t come as a surprise. Why? That is how human beings learn and form habits. Losing weight and keeping it off is a process and not an event – and so is leadership development! It takes time, effort and commitment. Hiring a personal trainer for our fitness regime increases our chances of losing weight and getting fit by a wide margin. How wide a margin? Research studies have shown that hiring a personal trainer increases your success rate by a whopping 1100%!

Get a “personal trainer” for your leadership development – an executive coach and fix why leadership training fails

Our leadership coaching program using Marshall Goldsmith’s stakeholder centered coaching process is like hiring a personal trainer for your fitness regime! Here, the coach is the “personal trainer” for our leadership growth! He will help you shed leadership fat and build some leadership muscles. The leadership coach will help us reduce or eliminate leadership bottlenecks and build on our leadership strengths. And best of all – it guarantees results. If there are no improvements in leadership behavior, there is simply no charge. Period!

Executive education and training programs help in creating awareness for change – however behavior change requires customized solutions and consistent follow-up and accountability, which executive coaching provides by its design.

Guaranteed and measurable leadership growth

Would you like to develop leaders in your organization? We use Marshall Goldsmith stakeholder centered coaching process to deliver measurable and guaranteed leadership growth.

We offer Marshall Goldsmith coaching in India, the middle east, and southeast Asia. It is the best coaching program in India because it is exactly the same executive coaching process used by Marshall Goldsmith to coach CEOs of Fortune 500 companies worldwide and we guarantee measurable leadership growth or you don’t pay at all.

Here are some of the features of Marshall Goldsmith executive coaching program
Guaranteed, measurable leadership growth as assessed – not by us – but by the leader’s own stakeholders
Unlike leadership training or executive education programs, the entire team will be involved while doing their day to day work
The leader becomes the coach and it has a cascading effect on the team increasing the team effectiveness and improving organizational culture
It is a system for continuous improvement for leaders themselves and their teams – although it is leadership coaching for the individual leader, the benefit of team coaching is realized through the involvement of the entire team
In a study of 11,000 leaders on 4 continents – 95% of the leaders using this leadership coaching process improved!
This is the exact same executive coaching process that has been used by 150 of the Fortune 500 companies to grow their leaders through CEO coaching and leadership coaching at C-suite levels
We are so confident of the process that we work on a no growth no pay basis (don’t try that with other vendors, lol!)

Schedule an exploratory 15-minute conversation with me today