You cannot learn to swim by reading a book!

VIEWPOINT: From Charles Edwards, Director, Edinburgh Institute of Leadership and Management Practice, Edinburgh Napier University.

If I write about or talk to you about swimming, will you be a better swimmer afterwards? If business leadership is to be improved, we need to redress the imbalance between talking about leadership and developing leaders. Too much energy is spent talking about what leadership is and what great leaders did. Interesting stories yes, but it is a patently flawed approach to believe that hearing about what one person did with their abilities in their unique context will make someone else with different abilities in a different context become an equally great leader. Also limited in developmental terms is assessing people against leadership competency frameworks. These often divert them away from what they are good at to what they aren’t, to the detriment of both them and their business.


Instead we need to use the practice of leadership as the principal development vehicle. And set emerging leaders with leadership tasks and projects, providing them with coaching, feedback and signposted resources and readings relevant to their context. This is not as straightforward as it sounds: the project has to be right for the individual and the business. The process of capturing the practice and the learning has to work well. The coaching, resource provision and feedback have to be of high developmental quality and integrated with each other. The learning leader, the employing business and the provider of the leadership development intervention all have important roles to play in making practice-based leadership development work. 

World-class swimmers train every day to better their performance – both in the water and out. Just as not every swimmer will become a Michael Phelps, not every manager will become a world class business leader. But there are times and places in business where most of them will need to both practice and exercise leadership – and the more confident and capable that leadership is, the more the business will benefit. 

The Edinburgh Institute of Leadership and Management Practice at Napier University conducts research on practice-based-learning and builds its executive education programs on practice based foundations.