You Won’t Become a Leader Thinking & Behaving as Everyone Else Does

by David Andrew Wiebe | Jul 19, 2023 | Leadership

There are many amazing leadership programs out there.

But in my observation, there is one major flaw with any I’ve been a part of:

They attempt to turn unique individuals into dogmatic cookie-cutter robots.

Now, there is nothing wrong with learning a methodology. I’m a big believer in ongoing self-education, and I plan to remain a lifelong learner. And I have found value in many methodologies.

Methodologies can offer many benefits – context, communication tools, increased productivity, cognition about oneself, and much more.

But I have yet to find a single program that doesn’t quash the individual in favor of conformity and uniformity – intentionally or unintentionally.

This tends to remove what made the individual uniquely attractive in the first place.

One should never lose sight of their distinctive spark if they hope to become a powerful leader.

That spark is what makes them a leader. They have no chance of becoming an effective leader if they think and behave as everyone else does. It’s because they think and behave as most never do that makes them an effective leader in the first place.

I’ve talked about separating the wheat from the chaff in the context of leadership before, and this is exactly what I mean. It’s almost like a form of post-program stress disorder. Or cognitive dissonance.

You can take the program with you, and you should, but you’ve got to figure out who you were without the program all over again. Because removing from you what made you unique is to your detriment, not a benefit, especially in leadership.

Your ability to think and behave differently is what will make you indispensable to a company or community or organization, no matter how hard your superiors or peers try to turn you into a real-life NPC (characters in role-playing games that can only speak from pre-determined selections of dialog options, like “Hello, welcome to Calgary.”).