There is a massive difference between what we know about leadership and what we do as leaders.
What makes leadership hard isn’t the theoretical, it’s the practical. It’s not about knowing what to say or do. It’s about whether you’re willing to experience the discomfort, risk and uncertainty of saying or doing it.
In other words, the critical challenge of leadership is, mostly, the challenge of emotional courage.
Emotional courage means standing apart from others without separating yourself from them. It means speaking up when others are silent and remaining steadfast, grounded and measured in the face of uncertainty. It means responding productively to political opposition without getting sidetracked, distracted or losing your focus. These are the things that distinguish powerful leaders from weak ones. Ever since I started teaching leadership on mountaineering expeditions in the late 1980s, the question of how to develop leaders has absorbed me. I’ve designed and taught everything from one-day team buildings to 30-day wilderness trips, from simulations to executive leadership courses.
The goal of any leadership development program is to change behavior. After a successful program, participants should show up differently, saying and doing things in new ways that produce better results. By that measure, most of what I’ve done – and what I’ve seen others do – has failed. Sure, the trainings are almost always fun and interesting.
But they fail the test of significant and sustained behavior change that produces better results after the program. Here’s why: We’re teaching the wrong things in the wrong ways.
If the challenge of leadership is emotional courage, then emotional courage is what we need to teach.
You can’t just learn about communication, you have to do it, in the heat of the moment, when the pressure is on, and your emotions are high. In everything I’ve tried, I have discovered two things that work:
Integrate leadership development into the work itself. This is the ideal environment, where the learning and the work are seamless.
Teach leadership in a way that requires emotional courage. The only way to teach courage is to require it of people. To give them opportunities to step into real situations they find uncomfortable and truly take the time to connect with the sensations that come with that.
(Peter Bregman helps CEOs and their leadership teams tackle their most important priorities together. His latest book is “18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done.”)
