Ask yourself a question: in the history of your business how much has been spent on leadership training, and I will confidently predict that you are no better led today after this significant investment than you were prior to this investment. Is this because leadership cannot be taught, or is it that leadership is being taught in the wrong way. Perhaps we are heaping skills and knowledge, without the behaviour change or the recognition of fatal flaws, onto people who are incapable of absorbing the information or deciphering the data or implementing any actions that have sustainability. I often use the example that leadership training is like putting people into a car with no steering wheel but a lot of power, and then asking them to go really, really fast.

The topic of leadership has constantly captivated the business world at large. This is exacerbated by the recent crises in the trust of leadership and experiences of widespread and continuous failures of leadership in business, in politics, education, and other institutions of modern society. My observations lead me to ask, can we trust our leaders and did we ever trust them? Perhaps a much more important question is, do our leaders trust us and will they ever? Trust is a vital ingredient in any relationship and without offering trust we cannot expect trust in return. Trust is also a process, not an event; to assume trust or just say ‘trust me,’ straightaway engenders a lack of trust like the snake in the film ‘The Jungle Book.’