Should Leadership courses focus on teaching students about leadership or on teaching students to be leaders?

Question

Should Leadership courses focus on teaching students about leadership or on teaching students to be leaders?

Answer 1

The purpose of all teaching/education is to enable the student to use what was learned in real life. Therefore, the focus of a Leadership course should be to create good and competent leaders. A part of that is to learn about leadership, what it is and how it is accomplished.

To simply learn about leadership is tantamount to learning something to make a good grade on a test, then immediately forget it.

The best leaders are also the best followers. One leads by virtue of example, and hopefully you will learn how to be the best and most ethical of examples possible.

Answer 2

Why not both? I could see a set-up working where the students look at real-world and fictional examples of leaders and analyze them according to how effective and how ethical their leadership was/is. Reflecting on leadership will help students consider connections to their own lives and how and where they have been or might be leaders.

Communication amongst the students is a must, too: a big aspect of successful leadership is recognizing the quality in others and guiding them to lead in their own capacity. This can work in a purely practical sense (it's delegation, basically), but in a more idealistic sense, it empowers people at all levels of leadership and strengthens the trust and relationships among them.

I hope this helped answer your question! I'll admit I don't have explicit expertise in leadership in the way we typically think of it, but sometimes being a leader is just about taking the plunge, so I figured I'd lead the way on answering your question. :)