Spinning Wheel With a Triangle at the Center

If I could single out one thing for ridicule in this life it would be "leadership seminars", leadership certificates, and leadership majors and minors, which many institutions are now offering.

In my experience, they're filled with crap that constantly makes leadership look like bad writing: Roman numeral 1, followed by subheading A...oh, make sure not to forget to indent. Just google "books on leadership" and see the drivel that emerges. You'll see so many numbered-step plans you'll think you're in AA. I can just imagine the fortune-cookie sounding nonsense contained in them -- "step 2, visualize your ideal environment". Yawn.

I remember meeting a candidate for a job in upper administration at my old university. It was a chance meeting in a hallway, though he apparently thought it was an interview. When I commented on how young he was (quite young considering the position), he explained, "I'm the youngest person doing what I'm doing in the country". He then, speaking roughly 500 words a second, attributed his "success" to some ridiculous, abstract "leadership model" that included some sort of spinning wheel with a triangle at the center that allowed him to prioritize, or visualize, or whatever. Afterward, my friend (and an extremely smart person to boot) just looked at me and said, "what the fuck was he talking about"? What the fuck indeed. He didn't get the job, but I'm sure he's in charge of something important somewhere.

It would be one thing if university environments rewarded leadership in any meaningful way. As someone formerly immersed in what one could call "student leadership", it always much more closely resembled student networking than anything else, and instilled all the worst aspects of bureaucratic organizations and disproportionate power allocation: kiss ass to get ahead, go along to get along, meet the right people, say the right things. I think the term "student leader" pretty closely resembles a knighthood: you can't earn it exactly, it's just something you arbitrarily get when someone important taps you on the shoulder.

We have crap like leadership seminars and endlessly preach the value of networking over judgment and conviction, and we wonder why so few people in positions of authority have any ability to motivate or inspire others.

Don't get me wrong. Leaders exist, in student populations and everywhere else. But, we spend far too much time mislabeling leadership, or worse, stamping it out when the genuine article presents itself. And leadership seminars like this might teach you a lot of things, but how to really lead isn't one of them. It's just a smoke screen for how to get ahead.