I am throwing at you a few thoughts on leadership and management that I selected from the interview with Henry Minzberg. There is more in the interview and I encourage you to spend more time on it.
Quotes:The trouble with leadership is that it implies an individual. When you say leader, you do not mean a group, you do not mean a community, you don't mean several people, you mean someone. And it's hyper individualistic. And what we need is a community shift not leadership.
Leadership for me is also an intrinsic part of management. They are not separate. In order to manage you need to lead. In order to lead you have to manage. Managers who don't lead are boring. Leaders who do not manage don't know what's going on. So those two things are intricately tied together. But we need to get to the community shift - we need to get to this idea that organisations are great because people are truly pulling together. By paying CEO 300 times more than an employee you are not sending this message, you are sending an opposite message.
Years ago I used to go around giving talks about what’s wrong with MBA programs. And finally people started asking: what are you doing about this? And I used to answer I am an academic, I am not supposed to do anything about anything, I am only supposed to complain.
I maintain that MBAs train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences. The wrong people because at the beginning the assumption is they are going to create managers or leaders. Nobody has ever created a leader in a classroom. Nobody has ever created a manager in a classroom. Just as nobody ever created a swimmer in a classroom. You learn to swim in the water. And managers learn to swim by being managers. And only there they can be developed. So we need much more of an involvement and learning from experience.
To learn management, forget learning leadership, nobody learns leadership, start with people who understand management, and then emphasize not the science of management, of which there is little, but the art of management, and particularly the craft of management. Management is about experience. Sit around the table, share the experience, reflect on experience, and learn from each other.
Full material, thanks to Antoinette and Otti from goodorganisations.com is available on their website.
p.s. There is also an interesting continuation into how managers should approach their learning, based on example of strategy formulation following the leadership section which has a selection of beautiful and refreshing thoughts. E.g. Ikea strategy invention, analysis vs synthesis approach, etc. It starts right after the leadership section, approximately 1:30 hours into the interview.
