Recently I attended a webinar with a panel of training and development (T+D) experts discussing the topic of Leadership Training. One individual's statement stood out in particular. This person declared that it takes 32 hours of development (instructional design) to create one hour of Leadership Training.

I nearly spit out my tea!

I created customized training programs for companies for years. Granted, I do work faster than most, but there is NO WAY it takes nearly a week of effort (given a 40-hour work week) to create one hour of Leadership Training.

This person's declaration has been smoldering in my subconscious for a couple of weeks now, and today I think I hit upon the reason this outrageous number was put "out there."

I think it's the difference between Leadership Training and Leadership Development.

Even though I DO think 32 hours is exceptionally high for the creation of one hour of training, I will concede that it is harder to design training than it is to design a development process. (Stick with me to the end of the article when I discuss the effectiveness of each approach.)

I'll give you an example from back when I taught college:

I taught Management 101 and one of our chapters was on teaming and team formation. I could have spent my 90 minutes of class time lecturing on the concepts of forming, storming, norming, and performing. Making slides to support my points. Maybe designing a "contrived" in-class activity that helped them to approximate team formation (but would never have allowed for storming, performing, or norming given the time constraints of training classes)...and hoping that they remembered the concepts for longer than to simply pass the next test.

OR

I could, and did, design a learning process.

I spent 10 minutes making a list of 20 things that can be commonly found on a college campus (a straw, a paperclip, a bulletin board advertisement from someone selling a car).

I then divided the group into 4 or 5 teams (I forget) and sent them out of the room for 30 minutes to go collect all the articles. The first team back with ALL the items won full-size Hershey bars and bragging rights.

THEN we spent the next 45 minutes talking about how they formed, stormed, normed, and performed. Every team had a different experience, every team had a different success rate. Only one team was 100% successful and - it turns out - it was led by an active duty Marine (which I had not known prior to the discussion) who assessed the task, divided up retrievals, gave assignments, and gave a deadline for their return.

THAT is a lesson in leadership that they will remember for the rest of their lives. And it took me 10 minutes to develop.

THAT is the difference between training and development.

Development involves experiences, discussion, reflection, questioning, coaching, application on the job, and more. If you want your future leaders to internalize leadership behaviors they cannot learn them in a sterile training room or in a set time period. They have to experience them and process them.

That's why we are very specific in saying that we offer Leadership Development services. We want your employees to actually be able to perform as a leader performs at the end of their development time (and really, is there ever an "end" to it? We all just learned recently that Emotional Intelligence is a critical leadership skill - that's not something we've taught in the past 30+ years).

Let's get our next generation of leaders prepared by providing them with the developmental experiences they need.