Online leadership training is convenient. That's probably its least interesting benefit. But convenience isn't the same as development.

Put enough PowerPoint slides into an online portal, add a few videos and technically we've created online leadership training. Whether anyone leads differently afterwards is another question.

When we built The Eighth Mile's leadership programs, we didn't want to recreate a classroom on a screen. We wanted leaders to learn something, go back into their organisation, test it against reality and then come back with better questions.

That changes what online leadership training can look like.

1. The Program Happens While Leadership Is Happening

Our programs run over several weeks for a reason. Leadership doesn't conveniently wait until the course is finished.

• A difficult conversation comes up.
• A team member pushes back.
• A decision doesn't work.
• Someone keeps escalating problems that should probably be solved without us.

Good. Now we have something real to work with.

Participants can take an idea from the program, apply it in their organisation and come back to discuss what actually happened.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes reality dismantles the theory rather quickly. Both are useful.

Learn. Apply. Reflect. Adjust. Try again.

That's considerably more valuable than completing a course and hoping we remember it six months later.

2. We Don't Pretend Leadership Has Neat Answers

There are plenty of leadership frameworks. We use some of them. What we don't do is pretend a framework can tell us exactly what to do every time people become complicated.

Leadership regularly asks us to choose between imperfect options.

• Two good opportunities compete for the same resources.
• Supporting one person negatively affects somebody else.
• We need to give someone autonomy while remaining accountable for the outcome.
• We need more information, but the decision can't wait.

Those are the conversations we're interested in. Our facilitated sessions aren't designed around getting participants to arrive at our answer.

They're designed to help leaders examine the situation properly, challenge their assumptions, hear different perspectives and develop the judgement to make their own.

3. Real Leadership Problems Are Welcome

We don't need to manufacture every case study. Our participants usually bring better ones.

• A conversation they've been avoiding.
• A team that isn't performing.
• A senior stakeholder they can't influence.
• A decision they aren't sure how to make.
• A person they're struggling to understand.

Something everybody in the organisation seems to know but nobody wants to say out loud. These aren't interruptions to the program. They're part of the program.

We can take the conversation where it needs to go rather than forcing every discussion back onto a predetermined script. That's where some of the most useful learning happens.

4. The Cohort Becomes Part of the Learning

Eighth Mile cohorts bring together leaders from different industries, organisations and backgrounds. That's deliberate.

When everyone around us works in the same system, it's remarkably easy to assume our way of doing things is simply how things are done. Then someone from another organisation asks: Why? That's useful.

Participants hear how other leaders approach similar problems. They see different organisational cultures. They challenge each other's assumptions and occasionally discover that something they've considered unavoidable for years isn't unavoidable at all.

Leadership development shouldn't simply confirm what we already believe. If every conversation leaves us feeling right, we probably haven't been challenged enough.

5. Coaching Makes It Personal

A group program can teach us about leadership. Coaching can help us understand our leadership.

The Eighth Mile programs include individual coaching because two people can sit through exactly the same session and need completely different things from it.

One leader might need to delegate more. Another might already be delegating too much without enough context or accountability. One might need to speak up. Another might need to leave considerably more room for everyone else.

Generic advice struggles with that.

Coaching gives participants somewhere to examine their own behaviour, decisions, relationships and challenges without pretending everyone needs to develop in exactly the same direction.

6. Our Facilitators Have Actually Led

This matters to us.

Our programs aren't delivered by people who have only studied leadership. The Eighth Mile team brings experience from Defence, business, psychology, organisational leadership, complex projects and high-pressure environments.

That doesn't mean experience automatically makes someone a good facilitator. And it certainly doesn't mean military leadership can simply be copied and pasted into a corporate environment. It means when we discuss accountability, uncertainty, conflict, difficult decisions and consequences, those conversations aren't purely theoretical.

We've got things right. We've got plenty wrong. Both make their way into the room.

7. Tactical and Operational Leadership Aren't the Same Job

We also don't believe every leader needs the same program.

Someone directly leading a team faces different leadership problems from a senior leader trying to align multiple teams, functions and competing organisational priorities.

That's why we separate our Tactical Leadership Program from our Operational Leadership Program.

Tactical leadership develops capability closer to the action: understanding people, influencing others, navigating conflict and solving problems.

Operational leadership moves the conversation higher: understanding behaviour at scale, influencing across boundaries, navigating organisational conflict and solving more complex problems where consequences extend beyond one team.

The fundamentals overlap. The level at which they're applied changes.

8. We Expect Things to Go Wrong

We aren't trying to create leaders who never make mistakes. That would be a fairly ambitious eight weeks. Leadership involves people, incomplete information and decisions with consequences. Eventually something won't work.

The useful capability is being able to examine it.

• What did we know at the time?
• What assumptions were we making?
• What did we miss?
• What impact did the decision have?
• What would we do differently now?
• Then we try again.

Development doesn't come from collecting leadership concepts. It comes from repeatedly testing our judgement against reality.

Online Isn't What Makes It Different

The Eighth Mile leadership programs happen online. That gives us flexibility. It allows leaders from different locations and industries to participate. It means development can happen alongside the work rather than requiring people to disappear from it for days at a time.

But online isn't the thing we're selling.

• The conversations are.
• The coaching is.
• The different perspectives are.
• The opportunity to test ideas against real leadership problems is.

The space to examine what we're doing, why we're doing it and whether there's a better way matters considerably more than the platform we use to do it.

We don't expect someone to finish an Eighth Mile program knowing exactly what to do in every leadership situation. Quite the opposite. We want them to be considerably better at working out what the situation requires when the answer isn't obvious.

That's the point of online leadership training with us.