Leadership Education, Training, and Development: What Should We Be Doing and What Can We Be Doing?

Abstract

Education, training, and development involve different kinds of activities and result in quite different outcomes. An ideal program to create leaders should incorporate all three: educating participants to provide a knowledge base, training them to acquire the desired skills, and assisting them in developing insight into their own beliefs and values and their effect on others. Education is the most academically legitimate when compared to training or development. The transfer of information and knowledge from sources, usually a textbook and an instructor, to recipients is the standard academic model. The degree to which students are able to correctly identify concepts, ideas, or values through quizzes and tests provides information that can be used to assess outcomes. Northouse's book Leadership Theory and Practice provides an excellent source of information on a rather wide range of models, theories, and perspectives on leadership. It also permits the reader to analyze the case studies provided at the end of each chapter. In the end, education results in the ability, as an example, to contrast and compare different theories, models, and perspectives. However, it can also allow an individual, on a personal basis, to accept one or more theories, models, or perspectives as most appropriate to her or his current situation or perhaps to an anticipated position. Education in the sense used here usually does not result in any kind of behavioral or attitudinal shift on the part of the student. If such a shift occurs, it is a byproduct of the leadership course of instruction. Training is of lower status in the academic world, but is a regular component of many curricula. In the case of leadership studies there are many possible kinds of skill training. As an example, individuals can be taught to use a standard way of conducting a meeting from the generation of an agenda, to opening the meeting, encouraging discussion, perhaps using brainstorming, and providing a written record afterward. In a more formal way a person can learn the rudiments of parliamentary procedure to include not only the agenda, but also the rules for making and amending motions, for conducting votes, and for providing minutes afterward.