Stop Teaching Leadership. Start Letting People Practice It

UpTrajectory Review

Dr. Robin Hills argues that organizations preparing digitally native workers for leadership roles still rely on passive training methods—presentations and scripted workshops—that fail to build real capability. He contends that leadership cannot be taught through instruction alone. It must be practiced through experience, feedback, and reflection. The piece targets a specific gap: companies invest heavily in leadership development while using formats that ignore how adults actually learn complex interpersonal skills.

For small-business operators, this critique cuts deep. Most owners promote their best technician or salesperson into a management role and assume personality will carry the day. When conflict erupts or a key employee quits, the new manager freezes. Hills' argument suggests that the money spent on off-site seminars or online leadership courses often buys information, not competence. Operators feel the cost directly: lost productivity, turnover, and the owner's own time spent firefighting problems a prepared manager could handle.

What is new here is not the observation that practice matters, but the framing of leadership as a performance discipline rather than a knowledge domain. Hills positions leadership alongside skills like surgery or negotiation—domains where simulation and repetition precede real-world execution. We agree with this. Where we grow skeptical is the risk of binary thinking. Practice without conceptual grounding can reinforce bad habits. The best programs blend brief instruction with immediate application, not one or the other.

The downstream effects reach beyond the training room. If organizations shift toward practice-based development, they will need managers who tolerate mistakes during learning, not just after competence arrives. This changes hiring criteria: look for coachability and self-awareness, not just charisma. It also redistributes cost. Practice-heavy development demands more time from senior leaders, not less. For a small business, that trade-off is real. The owner becomes the practice field, and many owners have not built the patience or structure to play that role consistently.

Watch whether your current development efforts produce behavior change or just completion certificates. Test one change: replace your next leadership workshop with a structured stretch assignment, a debrief, and a follow-up attempt. Measure what happens. If you run a business, ask whether your managers get low-stakes chances to handle conflict, give hard feedback, or navigate ambiguity before those skills are load-bearing. If not, you are not developing leaders. You are hoping.

The piece likely expands on specific methods—simulations, action learning, peer coaching—but the excerpt alone makes the core argument clear enough to act on. Operators should read it as a prompt to audit their own assumptions about how people grow into responsibility. The question is not whether you invest in development. It is whether your investment matches how humans actually learn.

“If we want leaders who can navigate conflict, uncertainty, and human behavior, we must stop telling them how to lead.” — The Next Web

Takeaway: Replace one passive leadership workshop with a practice assignment, a debrief, and a repeat attempt.