Are We Teaching Leadership Backward?

Why Leadership Education Should Begin With Character Before Technique

Leadership education becomes more meaningful when we ask not only what leaders can do, but what should guide them when authority, judgment, and responsibility meet. (Photo illustration by the Author)

I have spent enough time teaching leadership to recognize a pattern that now makes me somewhat uneasy. We are quite good at teaching people what leaders do. We teach students how to communicate a vision, motivate employees, manage conflict, delegate responsibility, respond to change, build teams, establish performance measures, and make decisions under pressure. We introduce theories that help explain why people follow, why organizations succeed, and why certain approaches work better in one setting than another. Much of this belongs in a leadership classroom. A person entrusted with responsibility for others should know how to organize work and make sound decisions.

Still, I have begun to wonder whether we sometimes start in the wrong place.

The question occurred to me not because leadership theory seems unimportant, but because technique has a peculiar limitation. It can make someone more capable without telling that person what those capabilities should serve. We can teach someone to become a persuasive communicator without teaching that person to value truth. We can explain motivation without resolving when influence becomes manipulation. We can teach strategic thinking without answering whether every…