142,000,000 - the number of listings on google when searching for leadership.
- 33,500,000 - the number of listings on google when searching for leadership training.
- 21,300,000 - the number of listings on google when searching for leadership training courses
- 13,100,000 - the number of listings on google when searching for leadership consulting firms
- 1,600,000 - the number of listings on google when searching for leadership consultants
For context - searching pornography only returns 11,600,000 hits (that may be a function of the audience not being able to spell such a long word since "sex" gives you 365,000,000 hits.)
Why are those statistics interesting? Here's why.
Having a wonderful lunch with a friend and former client yesterday we talked about the top problems companies face and the topic of leadership came up. We puzzled about the sheer number of consulting firms that offer leadership training, the number of blogs and articles on leadership, and the focus most companies put on leadership. My friend's experience indicated that poor leadership seemed to be a root cause of a lot of the other problems typically encountered at a company (I'm paraphrasing a bit - after all it was an hour-long lunch.)
But even with all that focus on leadership - we still have the problem.
We ended with this question...
Why, with so many resources and what seems to be a big concern of most companies - is leadership still such a huge issue? Why hasn't this either been solved or at least been moved down the list of problems companies face?
Why can't we seem to get leadership right?
Here's where we netted out...
- Companies identify leadership as a problem.
- Companies hire people or buy programs to address leadership.
- People go through the process of "learning leadership."
- People go back into organizations and are measured on the EXACT SAME THINGS they were measured on BEFORE training on leadership.
In other words, we don't measure leadership - we measure everything else. Profits, losses, costs, quality, errors, etc.
Here's some homework for you all.
Do we need new metrics for managers that have more to do with people and less to do with the output those people are responsible for?
Examples I came up with...
- Voluntary turnover to go to a lesser or same type job at another company/department (lower is better)
- Voluntary turnover to higher level jobs outside the company (in other words there wasn't a job open or that could be created for that person in the existing company.) (higher is better)
- Voluntary turnover to start own business (higher is better)
- Number of employees promoted OUT of a department to new, greater responsibility jobs WITHIN the company (higher is better)
- Level of recognition by other employees, departments, managers for the work of direct reports (this would mean you have to have a recognition program that is trackable - something you should do whether you end up using the data or not - but you should.) (higher is better)
What metrics should we be looking at the would indicate somone is a good leader?
What proof is there that the money spent on leadership training is money well-spent?
I believe that until we create new metrics for managers we will constantly have the need to train on leadership.
Anyone care to weigh in? Anyone, anyone?






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