Tuesday's Wall Street Journal carried an article about smaller businesses and training with the title: "Firms Go Online to Train Employees." Here's a key paragraph

"On-demand e-learning, delivered over the Web or by audio or videodisc, has become the second most popular approach to learning and training for small businesses, after print-based materials, says Steven S. Wexler, director of research and emerging technologies for the eLearning Guild, a Santa Rosa, Calif., trade group. About a third of its 17,000 U.S.-based members are small businesses that use some form of online training. In comparing the learning approaches of large and small businesses, people in smaller organizations are engaging more in 'cutting-edge' training with online games, private Wikipedia-type sites, blogs and podcasts, he says."

The article is great at outlining different tools for delivering information and training to people. But the very idea of "e-learning" is simply wrong.

What we're discussing might be e-delivery of information or perhaps, in some cases, e-training. It's not learning. For learning to happen, humans have to do something and even the most bionic and gadget-freaky among us are not e-people.

This is bad enough for simple processes like unpacking a part and installing it. It's downright dangerous when you start applying it to leadership.

Leadership is a complex human activity undertaken with other human beings in a constantly shifting environment. There are no scorecards. But there is success and there is failure.

Leadership is an apprentice trade. Here's how leadership learning happens.

You get an idea about what to do from some source. It may be a book, an article, a class, a web site, a video, your friend or your enemy. Then you apply it on the job.

It either works the way you expected or it doesn't. You use the feedback and analysis about what you did and how it worked to do things better next time.

You can assure that leadership training is available. You cannot assure that leadership learning happens. That's up to the individual. But what you can do is create an environment that encourages and promotes learning.

The best environments provide less experienced leaders with limited training and with lots of access to more experienced leaders who provide suggestions and feedback. The best environments provide less experienced leaders with lots of opportunities to lead and lots of feedback on how they do.

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