The Nonsense Dialogues
Welcome to the Nonsense Dialogues. "Dialogues" because we would like to think we sound like Socrates and Plato at the Academy. "Nonsense" because we think we sound like the great sceptics - Hume, Wittgenstein, Kant and so on. Actually, neither is true. Randal and David just like to argue about organisational and social psychological theory and practice in an invariably vain attempt to figure out what works and to complain about the myths, half-truths and just plain wrong shite that pass as good science and good practice in the workplace. And we are just conceited and deluded enough to think that someone else may be interested in listening to us do so.
The Nonsense Dialogues
Episode 3 Are leadership development courses a waste of time?
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David and Randal
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Season 1
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Episode 3
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In which we explore the very lucrative business of Leadership Development. We initially look to distinguish leader development from leadership development but soon wander through a series of increasingly discursive topics including:
- diversity of identity and skills, do these help or hinder?,
- the commercial imperative vs evidence based practice in leadership development,
- how a lack of a clear definition of leadership leads to mixed methodologies for leadership development that lack focus and thus impact,
- with organisations being complex systems beyond the ken of our simple primate brains, we thus use simple interventions that we can only hope will have the desired impact of better leadership,
- role of social engineering and elitism in leadership development,
- Randal says the best way to learn to become a leader is to become a good follower first and this is how naturalistic leader development used to happen,
- one study showed that team members prefer to follow team members who are good followers but the current leaders prefer as future leaders who distinguish themselves by taking charge and setting agendas for others.
- why don't organisations follow the literature on experiential learning, facing challenges and 702010? Randal and David disagree that these approaches are valid,
- but do agree that this is part of the much larger question of organisational change which should be covered later as this episode is already too long.
Being good evidence based practitioners, we are seeking feedback from our audience on our podcasts. So please tell us all the things we are doing well as well as pandering to your innate drive to criticise the work of others.
We may listen and adjust or we may just continue to be ourselves and do things our own way, dammit.
