The Best Time To Train Leaders Is Today

I was sitting in the auditorium at a German army base in Pfullendorf a couple of weeks ago where I was helping lead a workshop for leaders of the United States’ 7^th Army Training Command when one of my fellow presenters made a very powerful statement.

“There’s no course you can give a someone promoted to senior leadership in 2035 to make up for all the leadership development training they didn’t get along way,” observed Dr. James Greer, assistant professor at the U.S. Army’s elite School of Advanced Military Studies. “If you want them to be effective leaders then, you need to start training them for that job today.”

That is as true in business as it is in the military, yet business leaders at every level – from frontline managers to senior executives – get far less training than their peers in the military do.

Maybe that is why so many of the senior executives I have worked with over the years have imposter syndrome; they are doing a job they were never adequately trained to do, and they know it.

That is a tough position to be in, and a lot of leaders have been there – which begs an important question: Why don’t they invest more in training their successors?

The answer is, of course, time and money.

Most companies are too busy fighting fires to spend any time on fire prevention. That is unfortunate, because it takes far less time to prevent fires than it does to put them out.

It costs less, too.

That this conversation was happening at workshop for senior leaders of 7^th Army Training Command was doubly significant because that is the organization responsible for training all U.S. and allied ground forces in Europe and Africa. The purpose of the event was to rethink the organization’s mission in light of the changing demands created by the war in Ukraine and the broader reshuffling of the world’s geopolitical chessboard – to think about what the Army needs to look like in 2030, 2035, 2040, and beyond.

There was a lot of discussion about the need for transformational leadership, which was why I was there. I spoke about how teaching people to think for themselves, to challenge their assumptions, to overcome cognitive bias and groupthink, and to develop resilient plans with optionality can help them become the leaders their organizations need them to be if they are to succeed in this volatile and complex world.

Again, these are the same sort of cognitive skills business leaders need to succeed in a world that is no less volatile or complex than the one the military is operating in today.