My Thoughts

The Leadership Skills Most Managers Never Learn: Why We're Teaching All the Wrong Things

Related Reading: Check out these excellent resources - Professional Development Skills and Workplace Abuse Training

Here's something that'll make you uncomfortable: 87% of Australian managers are teaching leadership skills that were outdated before the iPhone was invented. And I should know – I spent the first eight years of my consulting career doing exactly that.

The problem isn't that we don't have enough leadership training. Christ, we've got more leadership courses than Melbourne's got coffee shops. The problem is we're teaching people to be leaders from 1995 whilst expecting them to manage teams in 2025.

The Great Leadership Training Scam

Walk into any corporate training room across Sydney, Brisbane, or Perth and you'll see the same tired presentation slides. "Effective Communication." "Team Building Exercises." "Performance Management Fundamentals." It's like watching Groundhog Day, except Bill Murray's been replaced by some overpaid consultant who's never actually managed a team of difficult personalities during a recession.

I was that consultant. For years.

The turning point came during a session I was running for a mining company up in Newman. Halfway through explaining the "sandwich method" of feedback (you know, compliment-criticism-compliment), this site supervisor – a bloke who'd been managing crews for twenty years – just stopped me dead.

"Mate," he said, "that sandwich thing doesn't work when Johnno's turned up three hours late because he's been on the piss again and the whole project's behind schedule."

He was absolutely right. And that's when I realised we've been teaching leadership like it happens in a bloody laboratory.

What They Don't Teach You About Real Leadership

The leadership skills that actually matter aren't the ones you'll find in Harvard Business Review. They're messier, more human, and definitely not politically correct enough for most training manuals.

Skill #1: Managing Your Own Emotional Wreckage

Nobody talks about this, but every manager I know has days when they want to throw their laptop out the window and move to Tasmania to breed alpacas. The difference between good leaders and shit ones isn't that good leaders don't have these days – it's that they've learned to manage their own chaos before trying to manage everyone else's.

I learned this the hard way during my first management role at a telecommunications company in Melbourne. Spent six months trying to motivate my team whilst I was having a complete nervous breakdown about my own performance. Turns out, people can smell leadership desperation from a kilometre away.

The best leaders I know have developed what I call "emotional compartmentalisation." They've got systems for dealing with their own stress, frustration, and imposter syndrome that don't involve taking it out on their teams. Some meditate. Some go for runs. One CEO I work with spends twenty minutes every morning ranting into her phone's voice recorder about everything that's annoying her, then deletes it.

Skill #2: The Art of Strategic Laziness

This sounds controversial, but hear me out: the best managers are strategically lazy. They don't try to control everything, fix everyone, or be involved in every decision. They identify the 20% of their job that actually moves the needle and ruthlessly ignore the rest.

I watched this play out beautifully at a Brisbane advertising agency. The creative director there – let's call him David – had two types of projects on his desk: ones that would make or break client relationships, and ones that were just... busy work. David spent 80% of his time on the first category and let his team handle the second category however they wanted.

His team loved him for it. Productivity went through the roof. And David? He went home at 5:30pm most days whilst his micromanaging counterparts at other agencies were still in the office trying to perfect PowerPoint slides nobody would remember.

The skill isn't laziness – it's knowing what deserves your attention and what doesn't.

Skill #3: Uncomfortable Conversations Without the Bullshit

Here's where most leadership training falls apart completely. They teach you to have "difficult conversations" using scripts and frameworks that sound like they were written by someone who's never actually fired anyone or dealt with a team member who's going through a divorce and taking it out on everyone.

Real leadership conversations are messy, emotional, and often happen in car parks, hallways, or over coffee rather than in scheduled meeting rooms. The managing difficult conversations training most companies provide barely scratches the surface.

The manager who taught me the most about this was running a construction crew in Darwin. When one of his sparkies was consistently showing up late and affecting the whole team's morale, he didn't schedule a formal performance review. He took the guy out for a beer after work and said, "Mate, I don't know what's going on in your life, but it's affecting everyone else. What do you need from me to sort this out?"

Turned out the guy's kid was sick and he'd been spending mornings at the hospital. They worked out a flexible start time, and the problem disappeared. No HR policies, no progressive disciplinary action, no sandwich method. Just one human being talking to another.

The Skills Gap Nobody Wants to Address

Here's what really gets me fired up: we're teaching leadership like it's a technical skill you can master through repetition, when it's actually more like being a good parent, friend, or partner. You can't follow a manual for it.

The leadership skills that separate the wheat from the chaff are:

Reading the room beyond words: Understanding when someone says "I'm fine" but their body language is screaming "I'm about to quit"
Adapting your communication style: Some people need direct feedback, others need gentle guidance, and most need something different depending on what's happening in their lives that week
Knowing when to break your own rules: Sometimes the policy says one thing, but good leadership requires doing something else
Managing up effectively: Protecting your team from organisational chaos while still delivering results

These aren't things you learn in a two-day workshop. They're things you develop through years of stuffing up, paying attention, and caring more about your people than your promotion prospects.

Why Traditional Training Keeps Missing the Mark

The corporate training industry has a dirty little secret: it's easier to teach frameworks than wisdom. You can put "SMART goals" on a slide and call it leadership development. You can't put "how to tell when your usually reliable team member is struggling with something personal" into a PowerPoint presentation.

Most leadership training treats management like it's accounting – follow these steps, get these results. But leadership is more like cooking. You can learn the basics, but great cooks develop intuition, adapt to circumstances, and sometimes throw the recipe out the window when something better presents itself.

I've seen managers with every certification under the sun who couldn't motivate a team to order lunch together. And I've seen supervisors with no formal training whatsoever who had people queuing up to work for them.

The difference? The second group understood that leadership is fundamentally about relationships, not processes.

What Actually Works in Australian Workplaces

After fifteen years of getting this wrong and then slowly getting it right, here's what I've learned works in our particular workplace culture:

Australians respond to authenticity more than authority. We can smell corporate bullshit from across the Pacific, and we switch off the moment someone starts speaking in management-speak rather than plain English.

The best Australian leaders I know share three characteristics:

They admit when they don't know something: Instead of pretending to have all the answers, they say "I'm not sure about that, let me find out" or "What do you think?"
They take responsibility for their team's failures: When something goes wrong, they don't throw their people under the bus. They figure out what went wrong and how to prevent it next time.
They celebrate success publicly and handle problems privately: When someone on their team does great work, everyone hears about it. When someone needs correction or support, it happens behind closed doors.

These aren't revolutionary concepts, but they're rare in practice because they require emotional intelligence and genuine care for other people. You can't fake either of those things for long.

The Real Leadership Development Nobody's Talking About

Want to know what the most effective leadership development looks like? It doesn't happen in training rooms or through online modules. It happens through:

Mentoring relationships with people who've actually done the job: Find someone who's managed teams successfully for years and buy them coffee regularly. Ask specific questions about specific situations you're facing.

Cross-industry exposure: The best insights often come from completely different industries. I learned more about customer service from a mate who manages a restaurant than from any retail training course.

Honest feedback from your actual team: Create safe ways for your people to tell you when you're stuffing up. Anonymous surveys, regular one-on-ones, or just paying attention to non-verbal cues.

Studying your own failures: Keep a private journal of management decisions that didn't work out the way you expected. What would you do differently? What assumptions were wrong?

The leadership skills that matter most can't be taught in a classroom because they're developed through experience, reflection, and genuine care for the people you're responsible for.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Modern Management

Here's the bit that makes HR departments nervous: sometimes good leadership means ignoring company policy. Sometimes it means bending rules for your people. Sometimes it means having conversations that would never survive in a corporate training manual.

The manager who taught me this was running a small accounting firm in Adelaide. When one of his senior accountants was going through a messy divorce and couldn't concentrate on work, instead of following the progressive disciplinary process for declining performance, he quietly redistributed her workload for two months until she got back on her feet.

Was it fair to the other team members who picked up extra work? Debatable. Did it result in a loyal, high-performing employee who stayed with the company for another eight years? Absolutely.

That's the kind of leadership judgement you can't learn from a textbook. It comes from understanding that you're managing human beings, not resources, and human beings are complicated, inconsistent, and occasionally need help that doesn't fit into neat categories.

The leadership skills most managers never learn aren't technical skills – they're human skills. And until we start treating leadership development like the complex, relationship-based discipline it actually is, we'll keep producing managers who can recite frameworks but can't actually lead people.

Because at the end of the day, leadership isn't about what you know. It's about who you are and how much you genuinely care about the people who've chosen to follow you.

Further Reading: