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Can Leadership Be Taught?
Leadership is not an easy subject to teach. In fact many people think and feel it is un-teachable.
 Even institutions of Higher Education seldom offer teaching in leadership, preferring instead to talk in terms of Leadership Studies. Most post graduate programmes aimed at managers focus on safer topics to teach, particularly in MBA programmes. The University of Exeter in the UK, where John Potter was appointed visiting professor in 1998 became the first centre in Europe to take the study of leadership seriously and it has now been operating for some fifteen years creating a variety of successful programmes to push forwards our knowledge of leadership.
The difficulty with the idea of ‘teaching leadership’ is that is presupposes that there is one ‘right way’ to be a leader. What real life has shown us is that no such phenomenon as ‘the right way to lead’ exists. There are a number of guiding principles but essentially leadership development happens as a result of exposure to situations, thought processes, role models, development of self awareness and a host of other factors. Effective leadership development is more about creating an offering of those factors from which the individual takes what he or she is capable of taking at the time of exposure.
There is no one book that explains all about leadership, even those by John Potter, Alan Hooper, John Adair, Kouzes and Posner, John Kotter, Edgar Schein, Tom Peters, John Katzenbach, Warren Bennis, Peter Drucker, Meredith Belbin, Alistair Mant, Keith Grint and Jonathan Gosling.
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