Who is in charge of teaching the next generation of great leaders?

Not leaders, apparently.

I've recently became casually acquainted with someone who designs and delivers the MBA programme for a renowned university. He seems like a nice person, he enjoys teaching, he meditates. And while I already had a dislike for academic mumbo-jumbo being the mainstream of leadership training over real-world solutions and scenarios, I'm afraid this was the nail in the coffin.

When offering me advice on how to handle a scenario, I kind of just stared at him in confusion. None of it seemed AT ALL realistic for how things play out in my experience. I was struck dumb by some of it, somewhere between lost for words and so-many-words-that-I'm-in-danger-of-full-on-ranting.

Wondering if it was a gender or cultural or industry divide, I asked a bunch of questions about his experiences in leadership rather than teaching leaders.

As it turns out, his background is in academics. The person in charge of the growth and development of thousands of future leaders STUDIES leadership: he has never done it. Has never managed through a crisis, changed cultures, grown businesses, had to make someone redundant. And it makes me wonder, are the leaders of the future being taught how to lead, or theories about leadership? Cr*p ones at that.

More recently, he and I have had conversations about "women's problems" (as he calls it) in leadership. He proudly told me about how he teaches gender equality, by making all the male classmates roleplay a mother struggling with her work hours because her husband is away on a business trip. The number of gender assumptions, biases, simplicities and frankly, totally-missing-the-point-ities in that example made me laugh. I asked how many women were involved in designing the gender equality component of his course. None, he admits.

It makes me think outside of leadership, where the textbooks about women's health are written by men. Where policing policies are written by white people. Where psychometric profiles are designed and validated by a room of people from the same cultural background.

Even as we cling to the slowly increasing proportion of women in leadership roles, where are their voices in the design of our programs or systems? How will they ever not be fighting against the "norm" if the norm was decided by whoever taught the course?

I don't know the answers to these questions. Maybe someone should write a textbook about it or teach it at university, because those seem good places to put stuff that isn't as simple as it sounds written down :-P

In the mean time, hit me up if you want any practical support from someone who HAS done it (and has the MBA too if that matters to you, but not from that university...)

#womenempoweringwomen