For centuries no one wrote about leadership. Plato wrote about the lives of the noble Greeks and Romans, not about leadership. Sun Tzu wrote about how to win a war. Machiavelli wrote about how to govern a principality and stay alive and out of the torture chamber.
The military worked hard to educate better officers. The US Military Academy at West Point trained men who would become officers for the Army, but also emphasized honorable conduct. Helmuth Graf von Moltke developed special training for junior officers of the Prussian army in how to conduct operations. But no one really started studying leadership as a discipline until the 1940s.
Since then things have accelerated. There are now more than fifty universities offering a doctorate in Leadership. There are research centers and associations and journals of all sorts. There are academic journal articles reviewing everything, and three Harvard faculty members have just released a 600 page book, The Handbook for Teaching Leadership.
This is all good and important work. It informs everything we do to help leaders become good at what they do. But leadership is a doing discipline. Classrooms and journals can only provide background for the learning and development that happens on the job.
That’s where you see the impact of two dramatic changes. When I started in business, the best thing that could happen to you was to get taken under the wing of a wise mentor. Today there have been two important innovations that go beyond that and bode well for the future.
Executive coaches have become part of the landscape. For someone who wants to develop his or her own talent, this kind of coaching can provide professional, personalized help.
Leadership development has become a way of thinking. Leadership development professionals inside organizations help with development plans, developmental assignments, and more. Individual leaders are beginning to see “development” as a critical concept.
If I were entering the workplace today, I wouldn’t spend much time on those academic studies and fat books that get all the press. Instead, I’d look for leadership development and coaching professionals who can help me develop on the job, where the important development happens.
