[Please note that this post is longer than normal given that it addresses and compares three viewpoints. I am posting it as one integrated conversation given that it culminates in the third part. You might want to read it a section at a time over time if you don’t have time for 2250 words in a row.]
Take an area, e.g. leadership (whether of one’s life or at work), and let us see what each lens (a learning perspective, a training perspective, or a development perspective) would reveal and what it would call for. Each perspective seems legitimate within its own perspective, and the three perspectives aren’t often compared and selected appropriate to the circumstances. People tend to be stuck in one mode of approach and use it to death because they are familiar and comfortable with it, think “it” works, and blame its failures on the recipients.
[The test here for whether all three approaches are appropriately available is to be able to say when you would use each appropriately and how the three integrate.]
From a learning/teaching perspective:
This approach calls for a new idea about leadership that isn’t yet known by the learner, and to teach them to understand that idea, and once understood, try to apply it.
- This can include reading about great or effective leaders, and trying to imitate their strengths and actions. (There is a whole book industry to support this with its yearly offerings.) Reading about inspiring people offers the same for one’s individual life.
- One can read case histories about who did what when that they said worked, understand the “applied” elements and approach as part of leadership, and again try to apply that understanding to your particular situation.
- One can watch a successful leader in your organization or person in your relational sphere and try to understand their perspective (from your perspective). Then, you can see what of that understanding you can put into play in your life or work.
The downsides of this approach:
- Understanding doesn’t necessarily translate to application (the “myth of application of understandings” hides this – if you say it fast it seems to make “common sense”). For example, many can talk about an area intelligently, however that doesn’t mean they can do what they are talking about – relationship being a good “topic” of greater understanding than practical living of those understandings.
- Modeling after another makes “common sense” and hence ought to be more suspect. Whoever is being modeled after is likely working from their own strengths and how the world appears to them. Their strengths are likely NOT your strengths, and how the world appears to them is likely NOT how the world appears to you. By imitation you are doubly screwed—losing the opportunity to find your strengths, and locking yourself into a way of leading that doesn’t fit you. You will be a bad imitation of the one you are emulating (for whom that approach is natural).
- Learning is better for passing an academic test on leadership than for actually providing leadership in real life situations (see the discussion regarding people doing better at knowing the right answers about relationship than at living them when the situation is highly emotionally charged).