How Modern Work Culture Turned ‘Leadership Training’ Into a Meme”

 

Sign up, sip coffee in a well-lit conference room, and leave with a laminated certificate and a vague sense of self-importance. Nowhere does this ritual play out more predictably than in my current communicating with impact seminar, where the leadership framework looks less like a cutting-edge roadmap to success and more like a highlights reel of what’s trendy in business self-help.

The problem? It’s all feel-good fluff dressed up as academic insight. Beneath the polished PowerPoints and overpriced workshops lies a buffet of methodological flaws, Western-centric biases, and outright omissions that make leadership training more of a TED Talk fan club than an actual, evidence-based development program.

MBTI: The Corporate Horoscope That Won’t Die

Let’s start with the elephant in the seminar room: the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The test that tells you whether you’re an “ENTP” or an “ISFJ” with the scientific rigor of a BuzzFeed quiz. This seminar, for some inexplicable reason, still trots it out as a legitimate personality assessment.

Reality check: MBTI is based on outdated theory, it has poor reliability (your results can change from one day to the next), and it tells you nothing about actual job performance. Using MBTI in a half-day workshop to “understand leadership styles” is like using astrology to hire your CFO. It’s corporate pseudoscience, and an institution that otherwise prides itself on academic rigour should know better.

If they actually cared about meaningful self-awareness, they’d ditch MBTI and maybe roll out the Big Five Personality model, a framework backed by decades of legitimate research. Unlike MBTI’s neat little boxes, the Big Five recognizes that personality traits exist on a spectrum—because, surprise, human beings are complex. But let’s be real: “Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability” don’t sell as well as “You’re an ENFP, go manifest your destiny.”

Emotional Intelligence: The Cure-All That’s Not

Then there’s the obsession with Emotional Intelligence (EI), popularized by Daniel Goleman, whose brand of pop-psychology has been a corporate darling for decades. Now, EI can be useful, but my seminar treats it like leadership’s magic bullet: master your emotions, recognize those of others, and boom—you’re suddenly Steve Jobs (odd again but that’s what the seminar does).

Except leadership isn’t a Hallmark movie. EI has its limits, and without ethical grounding, it’s just as easily used to manipulate as it is to inspire (see: cult leaders, con artists, and corrupt CEOs). Training leaders to be emotionally intelligent without reinforcing ethical responsibility is like giving someone a sharp knife and saying, “Use this wisely.”

Should we not focus on measurable, trainable EI competencies—active listening, constructive feedback, conflict resolution—and then assess whether leaders actually improve over time? But that would require effort – and a less descriptive class. And follow-ups. And measurable outcomes. And those don’t fit neatly on an infographic.

Western Bias: Leadership, But Make It Eurocentric

The leadership framework is also drenched in Western ideals—individual self-awareness, expressive emotional management, and a tidy little emphasis on cultural models that were mostly developed by Western academics for Western corporate settings. MBTI? American. Goleman’s EI? American. Hofstede’s cultural dimensions? Developed in the 1980s and still pretending global leadership can be mapped on an X-Y axis-

Meanwhile, actual leadership varies wildly by culture. In Japan, silence and consensus-building trump charismatic speechmaking. In many parts of Africa, leadership is deeply communal. This class, however, seems stuck in the idea that leadership is a lone genius having a breakthrough rather than a collective effort shaped by diverse contexts – even though it tells you how dated the idea of the hero leader is.

If they were serious about cultural intelligence (CQ), they’d train leaders to adapt—to shift leadership styles based on their environment rather than memorizing clichés about “hierarchical vs. egalitarian cultures.” But that’s messy. And messiness doesn’t fit in a LinkedIn-friendly soundbite.

What’s Missing? Oh, Just Ethics, Power, and the Real World

For all its glossy talk of self-awareness and emotional intelligence, the framework is curiously silent on ethics. Which is weird, considering we live in an era of rampant corporate scandals, where every other week a CEO gets exposed for fraud, corruption, or just being a terrible human being.

Nowhere in the class is there a deep dive into ethical decision-making, integrity, or moral leadership. Nowhere is there an examination of power dynamics—how leadership isn’t just about personal growth but about navigating office politics, managing incentives, and recognizing systemic forces. Instead, it’s all introspection and interpersonal skills, as if leadership happens in a vacuum and not inside actual companies filled with hierarchies, biases, and competing interests.

Also missing? Any real focus on change management or innovation. Leadership isn’t static; it’s about guiding people through disruption, yet in 2025 the hallowed institution is still busy teaching personality labels instead of crisis leadership. Where are the scenario drills? The adaptive leadership models? The playbooks for managing uncertainty? Apparently, in a different seminar.

Final Thoughts: Do Better

Leadership isn’t about knowing your “type” or memorizing an acronym-laden framework—it’s about navigating complexity, making tough calls, and doing so with integrity. This leadership training is stuck in the past, recycling old models because they’re easy to market. But easy isn’t the same as effective.

If they want to be more than just another corporate echo chamber, it’s time to ditch the pop-psychology, embrace evidence-based methods, and design programs that actually prepare leaders for the real world.

Until then, it’s just another seminar, another slideshow, and another round of executives leaving with a neatly packaged leadership style—and absolutely no idea how to use it.