What's the difference between management training and leadership development?

This article from Management Issues called, Managers Unsure What Leadership Development Really Means, is interesting. Here is a snippet.

Most American businesses don't understand the difference between management training and leadership development, and wrongly believe the answer to middle manager shortages is simply to throw money at the problem.

This study was done my a consulting company that provides leadership development, so this all needs to be put into context and taken with a dose of salt. But I would venture that many training professionals do not agree on the differences between management training and leadership development. Personally, I don't even think these are the right labels. Their biases are evident in their choice of words

management TRAINING
leadership DEVELOPMENT

I think both management and leadership can benefit from good training and need ongoing development. I believe that management is a craft - developed over time. And I think we can use some of the same learning tools to develop both management and leadership skills.

What they might be getting at - a point that I agree with - is that we often slap together a program of training classes that cover basic management skills and count that as our leadership development too. I have seen this many times. I once made a conscious choice to leave a job because they wanted to focus on these management basics and I wanted to provide a more holistic development approach.

Short but continuous informal development sessions (conversations, really) can boost both management and leadership skills faster and better than larger corporate university concepts.

The bottom line is that at your workplace, you want to have a plan in place to help managers build their craft - improve their abilities to manage and lead. This plan ought go beyond periodic bursts of outsources training classes to include building a learning environment.

Comments

[Terrence Seamon]

Would most American business managers know a good leadership development program if they saw one?

http://learningvoyager.blogspot.com/2007/09/what-is-good-leadership-development.html

[Howie]

True, it's one of the reasons why we don't understand a lot of things. Confusion usually happens if we ignore the real meaning.

[Charlie]

I agree. It's a common mistake for most of us to consider two different trainings to be the same because of the same basic idea.