How Did You Learn To Be A Leader? Was It The Same Way That Foulois Learned To Fly?

How did you learn to be a leader?  Successful executives told the Center for Creative Leadership that they learned through experiences, especially stretch assignments, hardships, and even mistakes. (1)  Currently the majority of leadership is learned on the job and most leaders say that they prefer to learn from experience.  But when executives, HR professionals and leaders are surveyed they say their organizations do not have the quantity or quality of leaders they need and that they are not satisfied with the current development methods.  So, why do we believe that experience is the best way to learn if it is not producing the leaders we need? And why are we not getting better results from this approach?  Perhaps looking at learning in a different context can shed some light on that question. 

Great Leaders are Polite

I read the Declaration of Independence today and I was struck with how polite it is, not just for a call to revolution, but polite for any context or purpose. 

Don't Try This At Home... Yet

Turning good advice into performance improvement takes more than you might think. 

You learn about leadership because you want to get better at leading.  Good advice and ideas about leadership are interesting, but not useful until you put them into action.  The problem is that there is a world of difference between knowing what to do and being able to do it.  So before you try it on the job, ask yourself five questions: