I went to see what commercial vendors are offering in the way of leadership and management development services. Since I believe that one of the greatest challenges IT departments will face in the next decade is a leadership gap as baby boom managers retire, I wanted to check out what the marketplace had to offer to smooth the transition.

Let's just say that I left the conference a bit overwhelmed by the number of programs on display and underwhelmed by the likely success of those programs. There were boot camps and coaches, videos and e-learning programs, self-guided courses and seminars.

But what almost all of them had in common was their focus on leadership skills. Skills. Skills. Skills. Everything was reduced to skills. There were courses on things like listening, communicating, writing, emotional intelligence and "visioning" (I despise that pseudoword). It was as if someone had set off an M-80 in the leadership section of a Barnes & Noble and each of the resulting fragments had been turned into a stand-alone curriculum advertised as the one solution for all your leadership deficits.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm all for skills, but most of these programs seemed at best to misconstrue and at worst to willfully obscure the purpose of skills. They are far from the only things that effective managers need.

What leaders need