When leading workshops, I ask a simple question: “How have you learned to lead?” I ask learners to vote for two out of six sources of learning. Are you main sources of learning leadership from:

• Books
• Courses
• Bosses (positive or negative lessons)
• Peers
• Role models (inside or outside work)
• Experience

Ninety-nine percent of people do not choose books or courses. Nearly everyone learns the most from direct experience or from the observed experience of bosses, peers and role models.

This approach to learning makes perfect sense. When you see someone do something well, it’s natural to try to copy them. If they step on a land mine, you make a quiet note not to tread the same path. This form of learning means that you will learn what works for you in your context. It is highly practical and highly personal. It is also powerful learning, because we all tend to believe what we discover more than what is revealed to  us. We own our learning, while we find it hard to own someone else’s idea or theory, however brilliant it may be.

But this sort of learning is also very dangerous, because it is a random walk. If you bump into good experiences, bosses, peers and role models, you are on the high road to success. If you are surrounded by Darth Vader-wannabes, you may find your path to leadership is much harder. There is a purpose to books and courses: They can put structure on your random walk of discovery and help you make sense of the nonsense you encounter from day to day.

The reality remains that you cannot read a book and finish on page 275 as a great leader, just as you cannot attend a two-day course and be transformed into the leader of the future. In practice, there is huge resistance to much leadership training for three reasons:

1. Leadership is all about know-how, not know-what skills.

It is about implicit, not explicit, knowledge. Explicit knowledge covers things like accounting and finance, where there is a clear body of knowledge that can be transmitted. Implicit knowledge is much more contextual. How you motivate people in one setting may be completely different from another setting; attitudes to risk vary dramatically by function and industry. There is no single solution to the question, “What is leadership?”

2. Leadership training can often be seen as a sign of weakness.

If I attend a course on the law, it shows that I am building my professional skills. If my boss tells me to take a course on motivating people, or problem-solving, or dealing with crises or on any other leadership skill, the implication may be that I am rubbish at motivation, problem-solving or crisis management. No one likes to admit that they need help with the core skills of leadership.

3. Leadership training often has a bad reputation.

With good reason – there are plenty of people out there with a flip chart and a theory who claim to have perfected the answer to leadership. Curiously, they have often failed to lead anything themselves, and then they wonder why they have a credibility gap. The blunt truth is that there is far too much poor leadership training in the market.

Ultimately, leadership is a journey of discovery for each of us. That means we have to adapt how we train people to help them manage their journey. It means we have to focus on coaching, career management, ensuring people get the right experiences at the right time, and then occasionally supporting those practices with a targeted course that meets an immediate need.

Leadership and leadership training are hard work, but that is good news for us all. If it were as easy as reading a manual, we would all be out of a job. Often, the tough stuff is the best stuff.