Short answer
A leader-as-teacher program is one where a company’s own executives teach its managers and future leaders, usually alongside outside faculty. Participants learn how the business really works from the people running it. The executives learn too: research from Washington University in St. Louis found that people who expect to teach material learn and organize it better than people who only expect to be tested on it.
The longer answer
The idea was popularized by Noel Tichy, who described it in The Leadership Engine (1997). It’s built into how Kern and Partners runs every program. Your executives co-teach with us and with curated university faculty, and your leaders are certified to teach the material to the next group.
Two things change when leaders teach. The skills stay in the building after the outside help leaves. And the message carries more weight, because it’s coming from someone who’ll be in the next meeting.
Sources
Nestojko, Bui, Kornell and Bjork, “Expecting to teach enhances learning and organization of knowledge in free recall of text passages,” Memory & Cognition, 2014
Noel M. Tichy, The Leadership Engine, 1997