“I’m already a natural leader! What would I get out of a leadership training course?” Well as Mickey Rourke said in Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish: “If you’re going to lead people, you’d better have somewhere to go.”
Leadership is not “getting people to listen to you”, it is not “being charismatic”. Leadership is a privilege, a duty, a responsibility, an honor and a job all its own.
Being a leader is not enough. You have to be a good leader, or your project is doomed. Here are a few skills you will pick up from a leadership training course…
Delineation
Some people think they are good leaders because they can get a project finished on time. Sure, that’s part of it, but if you only get a project finished on time because you wind up doing half the work yourself, that’s not leadership. Leadership means knowing how to recruit people, how to assign them and how to get the most out of their particular skillsets.
Management
There’s a lot of “bean counting” that goes into leadership. Sometimes management has nothing to do with getting people to follow you, and everything to do with simply making sure that the numbers add up.
Teambuilding
In the army they call it troop morale. Getting people to follow you is easy. If you have a big stick you can get people to do what you want. If you have a big checkbook you can get people to do what you want. If you have good leadership skills, you can get people to WANT to do what you want. Leadership is not bullying, bribing or coercing, leadership is leading the way.
In any event, no matter how natural a born leader you think you may be, certification goes quite a long way. “I once got my whole class to drop their pencils at exactly 1:30 PM in high school!” is just a story. Certification is proof of leading qualities.