Here's a catchy, frequent and eager offering in our media feeds. But in just a few words, it reveals outdated tropes embedded in prevailing talent development approaches.
Before I say more, we'll need to make a key distinction – one that has emerged as the most critical to make in my 10+ years of leadership education here in Japan. The one that aspiring leaders at all ages and stages, from university undergrads to company executives, tell me they've probably never internalized: the distinction between management and leadership.
Put succinctly, management is about getting an organization or team to run smoothly. A good manager uses limited resources wisely and adaptively, allocating inputs (time and money), planning projects, implementing policies, upholding protocols and procedures. The effects of management are direct, visible, and measurable. High-quality management produces stability and soundness in an organization.
Leadership is about transformation, making substantive change that moves people and their work forward to a new place. A good leader gets people to think in fresh ways, take some risks, experiment, explore, create, take leave of the comfort of stability and predictability. Leading offers a vision, motivates, aligns, and inspires to innovate. The effects of leadership are indirect, diffuse, and subtle. High-quality leadership manifests as positive energy in the hearts and minds of people.
Leadership is about transformation, making substantive change that moves people and their work forward to a new place.
In Japan, it's common to use the words management and leadership interchangeably. Of course, there are behaviors and situations of overlap. If we are trying to develop leaders, though, we must be disciplined enough to focus on leadership as a discrete pursuit. We must view management and leadership as different activities that require different mindsets and skillsets.
There are many kinds of skill categories. Many companies devise their own, depending on their talent needs. For my own teaching needs, I find it useful to consider cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Cognitive skills underpin the credentials we earn via classroom tests, entrance exams, and job interviews. They are easy to measure and track. For most professionals, advanced cognitive skills (math, organization of facts and information, logical reasoning) are what got them into the schools or jobs they aimed for. We work hard on them, explicitly.
Non-cognitive skills, by contrast, are not easy to measure or track. Many are relational, having to do with our relationships with ourselves, with others, and with the world around us: curiosity, empathy, self-awareness, perseverance. Skills that are central to our journeys through life and career. Yet, non-cognitive skills almost never become subject to intentional building – not like we learn geometry, or a second language, or new software. Sports, music, reading, volunteering, can help develop non-cognitive skills, but we don't usually engage in such recreational interests explicitly for that purpose.
Some might use the labels of "hard" for cognitive skills and "soft" for non-cognitive skills. But be careful not to give more weight, just out of habit!, to cognitive skills, because today leadership requires well-honed, thoughtfully deployed non-cognitive skills. I meet highly placed professionals, experts in their fields, who admit to never having spent time or effort on the non-cognitive realm. But as they advance in their careers, they find that developing themselves as leaders will take a firm and sustained focus on building relational skills. Consider the now-ubiquitous focus on "stakeholder engagement": leaders today must engage far more actively than before with multiple perspectives on their business, with others who have a stake in their decisions.
For all these reasons, I propose that leadership is not a training need. "Training" is for a tool or resource we have and want to use effectively. Training is important for continuously upgrading an organization's capabilities. We train managers - on IT systems, financial analysis, HR policies, AI integration. When a person is promoted to management, they will be eager to learn new tools that will help them be more effective and drive measurable results.
Leadership is a personal choice so, promoted to a leadership position, a person may or may not lead others. They may try to lead processes, but not people. The fact is, leaders only self-select. A person has to want to lead, have articulated what it means for them to "lead well," and for a good reason that is clear to them and that they can share with others (here is authenticity in practice).
Aspiring leaders can and should work on all kinds of skills and "behaviors." For this effort to actually develop leadership, however, most important is constant awareness that the skills we prioritize and the behaviors we display are rooted deeply in our everyday assumptions about people, work, ourselves and our own capacities. In executive search, I would look for candidates with that level of awareness; with a demonstrated track record of reflecting, learning, and growing over time. And I would look for how much, and precisely how, they have worked to develop leadership in others.
Any organization serious about developing leaders will need to embrace that the effort takes time. They will need to identify development candidates in fresh, inventive and holistic ways, and then engage their talent in self-discovery through new challenges and exploration of possible futures. They will need to ask them open-ended questions and guide them in formulating answers; support them in developing purpose and vision and then in communicating these with presence and conviction. They will need to allow for candidates' setbacks and disappointments, and get excited about their wins of all sizes and in multiple domains of life.
When your leaders truly lead, they will do so of their own accord and as an independent act of self-expression. They will have evolved, as people, as professionals, and your organization will be stronger for it.
