Why Leadership Development Fails: The Assembly Line Fallacy
Summary
I’ve explained how a preoccupation with information, insights, and inspiration perpetuates the Leadership Development Delusion. In this essay, I introduce a second explanation for why leadership development fails to develop leaders—it relies on methods that worked in an industrial economy but lack relevance today.
Arms Full of Garbage
My family and I visited Disneyland several years ago. During one of our days in the park, we decided to stake out a spot to watch the fireworks that take place each night. We purchased takeout and enjoyed our picnic dinner together.
As the evening grew darker, hundreds of other park guests gathered around us. I realized at that point that I needed to find a garbage can to dispose of our dinner wrappers, bags, and cups. With so many people surrounding us, there may have been a receptacle ten feet from us, but I wouldn’t have been able to see it. I resigned myself to bear-hugging our garbage throughout the duration of the show.
As the music came up to signal the beginning of the show, I noticed a teenage Disney employee walking through the crowd in our direction. Since my arms were preoccupied, I bobbed back and forth like a buoy, trying to get his attention.
It worked. He knew a dad in distress when he saw one. As he walked toward me, I called out, “Can you point me to the nearest garbage can?” He didn’t say a word. Instead, he opened his arms like he was going to give me a hug and scooped up all of my garbage.
“Here, let me take that for you,” he said.
He turned and disappeared into the crowd. I was dumbfounded.
Disney employs over 200,000 people. How does a company that size train a teenager to willingly—even joyfully—carry away a stranger’s garbage? He could have ignored my plea for help, or directed me to the nearest garbage can. Instead, he scooped it up for me and freed me to enjoy the show with my family.
Concrete vs. Catalytic Competence
The Disney employee demonstrated a number of skills during our brief interaction:
Emotional intelligence: He could read the expression on my face as one of distress.
Situational awareness: He appreciated the fact that I was landlocked within the crowd.
Decision-making: In a matter of seconds, he had to determine a course of action.
Presence under pressure: Among the things vying for his attention, he prioritized my need.
Empathy in action: Rather than remain unaffected, he felt what I was feeling.
We typically refer to skills like this as “soft skills.” It’s a disservice to the value of these skills that we call them “soft.” As Seth Godin wrote, “We often call interpersonal and human skills ‘soft,’ which wrongly implies they’re optional or less important.” He wrote this in a Medium article entitled Let’s Stop Calling Them Soft Skills.
I agree. Let’s stop calling them “soft skills.” And let’s stop using “hard skills” while we’re at it.
Instead, I suggest we refer to Concrete Competence and Catalytic Competence. Concrete competencies describe a person’s ability to carry out discrete tasks. Catalytic competencies describe everything else. A catalyst facilitates change without being consumed in the process.
I suspect that the Disney employee, wherever he is now, has been recognized for these skills and is doing well. But it’s not just the hospitality industry that is searching for people with catalytic competence. Virtually every industry and company needs humans who know how to be, well, human.
But it hasn’t always been this way.
Human Machines
The American economy a century ago was largely based on manufacturing. We built stuff.
In the quest for optimal efficiency and productivity, one impediment stood out from all the rest: humans. For all of our aptitudes and intelligence, we humans are a complex, unpredictable, forgetful, and fragile bunch. We’re prone to squabbles, laziness, self-interest, and stubbornness.
This explains our attraction to machines. They don’t argue, talk back, or show up late.
In order for the industrial complex to function, something had to be done about the inherent lack of predictability and consistency humans brought to the workplace. Efficiency, productivity, and consistency necessitated that humans behave more like machines.
Enter Frederick Winslow Taylor, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1856, who even as a child gained a reputation for his meticulous nature. He organized his books and clothing with extraordinary attention to detail, and grew distressed if anything was out of order.
Every step of the production process had to be timed and tested by a “Time Engineer” to determine the most efficient way to complete a series of tasks.
Taylor began his career as a laborer at Midvale Steel in Philadelphia, eventually rising to chief engineer. It was there that he started experimenting with what would become scientific management.
Taylor noticed that workers on the shop floor had varying levels of productivity, even when doing the same task. To prove there was a better way, he took a stopwatch and clipboard and timed every motion a worker made while performing simple tasks—such as moving iron bars, turning a lathe, or lifting parts.
One well-known example of his early work involved the task of cutting metal with a lathe. In order to increase consistency and efficiency, Taylor would:
Observe the motions involved in placing the metal, setting the tool, and performing the cut.
Time each motion with a stopwatch.
Record variations and eliminate unnecessary movements.
Determine the fastest, most efficient method.
Train workers to follow that standardized sequence exactly.
Taylor would later describe how this allowed Midvale Steel to double or even triple output without exhausting workers—provided they followed the precise instructions derived from his measurements.
In his 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor writes:
“In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.”
Numerous companies borrowed from his principles to transform efficiency and production. But Taylor’s practices incurred a hefty cost—intended or not. His philosophy of management reinforced the notion that humans can and should behave more like machines.
Seminars as Assembly Lines
A host of factors converged toward the middle of the 20th century to revolutionize the American economy. An economy based on knowledge, innovation, and service replaced demands for standardization, efficiency, and manual labor from the industrial era. The new economy required adaptability, technology, and human creativity.
The industrial economy needed humans to behave more like machines. Companies now need humans to behave more like humans. Companies used to seek employees to fulfill the tasks listed on a job description. Increasingly, they want employees with catalytic competence.
Employers exchanged Taylor’s focus on technical skills and principles and began to focus on catalytic competencies. But while they updated their leadership development content, they failed to update the process by which they sought to cultivate these skills.
This fatal flaw resulted in programs, conferences, workshops, and seminars predicated on the faulty notion that leaders would develop catalytic competence through repeated exposure to information.
As an example, I was once asked to sit through a six-session seminar as an observer. Participants met weekly for an entire day. Each day included a series of modules that focused on topics like effective listening and communication, and how to build trust. Sessions blended slide presentations, small group discussion, and hands-on exercises designed to illustrate the principles contained in the seminar binder. At the close of the final session, participants shared their takeaways with the group and received a certificate of completion.
This approach to leadership development is so familiar, so ubiquitous, that we hardly question it. The fact that it shows little impact on the participants doesn’t seem to matter. They learned the principles. They did the activities and the homework. They must be better leaders, right?
Wrong.
It’s a leadership development assembly line. We even talk about training as something we go “through,” like cars passing through various stages of assembly. Proof of completion serves as evidence that we’ve completed the process and presumably developed a particular catalytic competence.
Leaders do not develop the skills required for today’s marketplace through the same means that they developed skills for the industrial economy a century ago. Frederick Winslow Taylor improved efficiency by teaching employees discrete steps they could replicate throughout the manufacturing process. This worked because the training process treated employees like they were a product on an assembly line. Instead of assembling vehicles, employees acquired skills in modules and received certifications for demonstrating competence. The industrial approach works with finite, measurable skills because they provide immediate feedback. A trainer can confirm an employee’s competence in a particular skill through observation—either they adhere to each step in the process or they don’t.
But how do you improve a leader’s ability to build trust, make good decisions, or improve their listening and communication skills?
You can’t time empathy with a stopwatch.
The reason leadership development continues to fail to develop leaders is that it retains the belief that leaders can develop concrete and catalytic skills through the same means. It swapped out the training content without updating the process. The belief that a leader can go through a seminar, attend a conference, or complete a course reflects our assembly line mentality.
Using my example above, the leaders traveled through the six-week seminar like vehicles along an assembly line. They learned about soft skills each week and had the opportunity to practice them with one another. Those with perfect attendance received their certificate of completion.
The problem, of course, is that the way we develop catalytic skills shares little in common with how we learn concrete skills.
Adapting our approach to developing leaders is not a matter of swapping out content. We have to change the process.
How to Actually Develop Catalytic Competence
So how did that teenage Disney employee develop his catalytic competence? And what can we learn and apply to the way we develop leaders in the new economy?
Use Mentoring, Not Modules
Pair every new employee with someone who already demonstrates the behaviors you most want to multiply. This isn’t classroom training. It’s apprenticeship in real work. Follow the See-Do-Coach model:
See: Have an employee observe model behavior as demonstrated by experienced colleagues in actual work situations.
Do: Have them practice the behavior in real situations with mentor support.
Coach: Provide specific, immediate feedback while the learning is fresh.
Reinforce behaviors through recognition and stories
When someone demonstrates the behaviors you want, celebrate them publicly—and turn recognized behaviors into stories that spread throughout the organization.
Make Leaders into Coaches
This study from Gallup highlights the need for bosses to function as coaches. It goes on to highlight the following qualities of exceptional coaches:
Focus on individual and team engagement: Coaches provide employees what they need to succeed, leveraging the 12 elements of engagement to drive motivation and performance.
Leverage individual talents and strengths: Coaches understand and deploy each employee’s unique strengths
Set clear expectations and offer developmental feedback: Coaches establish clear goals and deliver feedback that enhances strengths and team effectiveness—a contrast to bosses who typically focus on correcting mistakes.
Turn Your Abstract Values into Specific Behaviors
Multiply the behaviors that matter most. Whatever your organization claims to value—innovation, collaboration, quality, integrity—define exactly what those look like in daily practice. This essential step translates abstract ideas into visible expressions.
Why This Approach Works
Clarity: Everyone knows exactly what “good” looks like.
Repetition: Behaviors become habit through on-the-job practice, not just concepts employees memorize for a test.
Social norming: New hires see the culture in action from day one.
Continuous development: Formal mentoring and informal peer guidance preserve high standards over time.
The Real Competitive Advantage
While your competitors send their people to leadership seminars, you create leaders through a fundamentally different process. You understand that catalytic competence can’t be downloaded—it has to be developed through relationships, practice, and continuous reinforcement in real situations.
The assembly line was a brilliant solution for industrial challenges. But humans aren’t products. We’re complex beings whose greatest capabilities emerge through authentically human development processes.
The Disney employee that collected my garbage would have been seen by Taylor as a clear demonstration of inefficiency. I saw his behavior as an act of human kindness.
The companies that prioritize human development won’t just develop better leaders—they’ll humanize their organizations. And in an increasingly automated world, being more human isn’t just an advantage.
It’s essential.