Business Is the Curriculum, and Leaders Are Teachers

Happily, there is a significant side benefit: the alignment of executive teaching staff at every level around common frameworks, tools and messages. Doing your LAT program on a large scale does, however, mean significant time and energy to “train the trainer” — several times more than for an ordinary program in which the educator pool is relatively fixed.

Those Who Can, Do — and Teach
To sum it up, we are seeing that more and more companies are focused on enhancing their organizations’ capability to execute strategy. Indeed, today more than ever, building alignment around strategy has become a critical task for senior leaders. Although it’s subject to several important caveats, if the strategy is important and the leaders willing and capable, they should teach.

Sustainable alignment comes not when leaders talk at their people about what needs to get done, but when they engage real issues, work with them directly and teach from experience. LAT programs, done well, can be an extraordinarily valuable tool to build the leadership bench. Institutional memory and organizational wisdom shouldn’t have to retire when the leader does.