Why You Can't Teach Leadership — Experience vs. Instruction

I'm slightly exaggerating, as I do think there are some very specific things we can teach. But the majority of the leadership job is gained through the school of hard knocks.

Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.

As a relatively senior leader at Amazon with a good amount of tenure, I was regularly a part of training classes. We’d train people on interviewing, particularly through the bar raiser program. We’d train people on writing documents. We’d give managers training on how the Amazon calibration process worked (that one was so much fun).

I was a part of a few “leadership” training courses, and I have to admit that I didn’t get a ton of value from most of them. Why is that?

Because it’s almost impossible to train people to be leaders.

The streets of Paris. I decided the photos this week would be bicycle themed. Photo credit: My wife Inga

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Why is it tough to train leadership?

I invented some great definitions of leadership and management in a past article on the topic. I say they’re great because I’m the author of this newsletter, and it turns out I can say whatever I want. Mint chocolate chip ice cream is also the best flavor of ice cream. Fact.

Leadership is the act of inspiring, influencing, and guiding others towards a common goal or vision. In short, a leader is someone who says, “This way everyone!”

Pelagius is a teenager in a high school classroom. Pelagius is probably annoyed that he was named in this story by an overly random online name generation tool. But I suppose I should move on.

Pelagius was asked to take attendance by his teacher. Every day, Pelagius stands in front of the class, and writes down who is in class on time, and who isn’t. If a classmate is late, Pelagius sends them to the administration’s office.

Is Pelagius a leader? They’re in front of the classroom, doing administrative things. That’s leadership, isn’t it? I’d say no.

• Are they inspiring? Well, that’s easy, attendance is not inspiring.

• Are they influencing others? The act of taking attendance may “influence” their classmates to attend, but Pelagius was asked to take attendance, it was not their choice. Sending them to the office may be an “influence”, but it’s the policy that sent them to the office, not Pelagius.

• Are they guiding others towards a goal or vision? They were given the specific requirements to execute, and they’re executing them. There is no guiding going on.

If Pelagius invented attendance, and came up with these policies, I think everyone would agree that Pelagius would be unpopular with his friends. But also, Pelagius would be a leader. You don’t necessarily need to lead in popular directions.

What’s the difference? It’s that leadership inherently means not following prescriptive guidelines. Leadership is about independently assessing situations.

• You independently assess your classmates or co-workers, and determine what it takes to inspire them.

• You independently determine what actions or changes are needed in your classmates or co-workers, and influence them to take action or make those changes.

• You independently look at a goal or vision (perhaps establishing it yourself), and guide others towards achieving those aims.

There are absolutely leadership frameworks you can learn, and 7-step processes for change management or other garbage that consulting companies sell.

But what’s real leadership?

• A junior-level SDE asks their team (influence) to consider adopting some changes to their build process (goal), explaining the advantages, and the relatively small cost to implement (inspire).

• A senior leader recognizes that one of their organizations was moving too quickly towards a launch, putting customer experience at risk. They step in to correct their organization (influence), explaining why they value customer experience (inspire) over hitting the launch schedule (vision).

How can you teach someone to speak up inside a group of senior peers? How can you teach someone to balance complex, ambiguous topics of customer experience and financial launch impacts?

What are the ingredients for successful leadership for anyone from junior employee to senior exec?