Leadership as Adult Education

I believe that management and leadership training are forms of adult education. To demonstrate why I feel this I will point out a series of classes that we provide at our organization. I've discuss our LEAD series before but basically our LEAD series are classes designed to help leaders develop within our industry. There are three classes that currently make up our LEAD series; Foundational Leadership, Insightful Leadership and Speaking as a Leader.

Foundational Leadership focuses on basic leadership skills. We have noticed that first time crew leaders and supervisors are not necessarily promoted because of their skills at leading, but rather for their ability to complete projects.  Do they have any true leadership skills? Do they know how to lead and motivate and inspire their crews? We created this class to give first time leaders in our industry tools and techniques they can use immediately on the job including employee retention techniques, change management, conflict management, and situational leadership. Insightful Leadership is the next step up in leadership development from Foundational Leadership. It focuses on personality identification, understanding different personalities of the leader and within the team, being able to identify the type of personality, and how best to work with that team member successfully.  Speaking as a Leader helps field leaders present themselves to their teams, to their management, and their clients. What is the point of giving leaders the tools and techniques to lead if they can't use them with their teams, clients, and bosses well? This class is perfect for helping new or mature field and office leaders overcome their fears of speaking and presentations.



All of these classes are taught more in a Developmental Perspective rather than a Transmission Perspective as so many of our other classes are. Our primary offering are CBT's for safety training and Instructor Led classes for skills development. All of these are lecture style classes where the trainee is a passive participant, absorbing information. These LEAD classes are led by a facilitator who has been in the industry for many years, knows what the new leaders are dealing with, and can help them understand the best way through the challenges. Secondly, we facilitate, we don't teach. We allow the participants to understand and grow and develop rather than just tell them what they need to know.



In terms of this being true "adult education" I look specifically at one of Malcolm Knowles' 4 Principles of Andragogy where he states; "adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance and impact to their job or personal life" (Pappas, 2013). We provide these LEAD classes using stories, experiences, and exercises derived directly from the facilitators lives' and from experiences within the industry. We endeavor to make the training directly relevant. When I look around at all of the training we provide, it's point of need rather than developmental. LEAD provides us the ability to help direct and grow our trainees and provide them a career path in leadership.



Pappas, C. (2013). The Adult Learning Theory - Andragogy - of Malcolm Knowles. eLearning Industry. https://elearningindustry.com/the-adult-learning-theory-andragogy-of-malcolm-knowles