Putting Psychology Back Into Leadership Training

Something is afoot that has made leadership both ubiquitous and scarce. On the one hand, there is a culture-wide obsession with leadership. Among its symptoms is the desire by anyone worth their salt to seek a “leadership position,” middle-school “leadership curricula,” ever more creative C-suite monikers (“chief pastry officer,” anyone?), and countless executive coaches at the ready to train and rescue leaders.

A veritable leadership-industrial complex has sprung up to meet the booming demand. Besides coaches, it includes MBA offerings, executive boot camps, management rehab programs, advanced degrees in leadership, and “professors of leadership.” The message from these opportunities is that leadership is a teachable science, not a complex and unpredictable intersection of luck, circumstance, experience, and temperament.

Yet, despite so many improvement opportunities, we see leadership failure everywhere we look. Did these leaders simply not hire the right coach? Would it be even worse if the leadership-industrial complex did not exist to offer its services? Or is it partly to blame for nurturing the leadership obsession by helping individuals motivated by the wrong reasons visualize a way to the top?

A casual follower of leadership training opportunities is struck by their self-confidence and the recurrence of certain buzzwords. Programs promise tested recipes to create “transformative” “change agents” who can “innovate,” “motivate,” “empower,” “unleash,” and “disrupt” while building a “personal brand.” There is comparatively little attention paid to inconvenient personality traits that might complicate the process or get in the way, and to how some people are not “natural leaders.” Interventions from the mostly non-therapists developing and teaching these programs may not be able to reverse these obstacles. Everyone seems to be reasonable raw material and to be welcome on the leadership bandwagon.

Consider Jeff, a 32-year-old MBA student and former patient of mine. When I first met him, Jeff had just started business school after spending six months doing environmental research in Africa. Jeff’s goal was to return there to help budding green technology entrepreneurs obtain U.S. microloans. His curriculum covered how to lead people and organizations but failed to “diagnose” Jeff as a serious introvert.

Through practice and coaching, Jeff was made to understand he could become as comfortable pitching investors as his extroverted classmates. The curriculum seemed to communicate that anyone can become a social animal capable of dominating interpersonal interactions. But that never happened, and Jeff would palpitate his way through dry-run pitches, dreaded role-play exercises, and obligatory schmoozing, driving him to seek a medication that would “slow [his] heart down.” Fearing he could never become that leader, he dropped out.

Even if leadership training tools were scientifically proven, today’s culture can still complicate the emergence of leaders. For better or worse, technology has made us a more horizontal society. Natural hierarchies, such as between parent and child or professor and student, have been fundamentally shaken. We feel more informed and therefore more empowered. As a result, we do not easily cede authority. The Uber-like gig economy has also meant that many people are now free agents, making organizations with leaders firmly seated on top of a pyramid-like structure look like edifices of the past.

Also, leaders of the past have been people onto whom we can project personal aspirations and causes. But this requires that our leaders be, to some degree, a blank slate. Instead, today’s leaders are an open book, with their biographies, foibles, tastes, and positions all a matter of public record and public fodder.

JFK and Winston Churchill might not have become the leaders we admire today if the public had known about the former’s compulsive infidelity or the latter’s “black dog,” as he called his bouts of severe depression. The absence of privacy is depriving us of the ability to imagine leaders in the best possible light. We need leaders to be somewhat unknown to succeed, but we can’t stop Googling! Like Uberization, a post-privacy world complicates contemporary leadership, and no visioning camp can resolve that.

It is so basic as not to require stating, but it does: Not everyone can be a leader. Too many people are feeling compelled to seek leadership positions to prove their value; too many vague executive roles and titles are being created; and a large industry is mediating the curious supply and demand. Along the way, we are ignoring the fundamentals of psychology, daunting cultural winds, and the outsize role of pure, cold luck in who gets to lead.

There is nothing wrong with stoking ambition or offering development opportunities, but it should not happen at the expense of giving people an inferiority complex. We need to celebrate human productivity at all its levels, starting with the followers without whom no successful leader has ever emerged. Support them, invest in them, and respect them for their intrinsic worth, not their “leadership potential.”

This post also appeared in Fortune magazine.