The Value of Experience in Leadership Development

The Nobel Prize winning author Albert Camus once noted, “You cannot create experience, you must undergo it.”

This points to a problem inherent in most all training programs, and perhaps especially in leadership development programs; workshops and seminars don’t provide experience (and therefore don’t prepare people with skills).

To build your leadership skills (or to build these organizational leadership skills in others) you must give people the opportunity to have experiences – and practice.

Knowledge (a strength of traditional training – whether face to face, on-line or through some other medium) is an important component in the process, but it is is neither the be all, or end all for leadership development.

To maximize the effectiveness of leadership development the process must be a combination of knowledge acquisition with the chance to use those ideas to convert it into skills (read you must undergo experience.)

In deference to Camus though for our own (or others) leadership development training, we can create processes that allow people to create experience.

All of this leads us to the fact that the best results to your leadership skill improvement efforts will include: training, opportunities to integrate knowledge into practice, and leadership coaching.

It was from these beliefs that we created the Remarkable Leadership Learning System. (You can also get a free sample of the System)

If you are looking for the key to your own development, you can take advantage of a 2 month preview.

If you are looking for an off the shelf  leadership development program for use in your organization, contact us.

If you would like to explore how our experience in all of these components could be used to help you improve or build your own internal leadership development programs, we can help you do that too!  Send me an email and we can have a conversation (Kevin@KevinEikenberry.com).

Regardless of what next steps you take, take some step!

Determine what skills you need to improve as a leader, and do more than read another blog post, buy another book, or take another workshop.  Find ways to put your ideas to work – create opportunities to practice and undergo an experience!