Roddy Mullin is a leadership, business and personal coach/mentor who helps partners and directors of all types of firms and
organisations through business consultancy services, to
solve problems and make money over the last 22 years. Contribute to the leadership debate on his blog below.
No manager, let alone a leader, has ever been created in a classroom
In a recent blog on management education, Henry Mintzberg's stated that "no manager, let alone leader, has ever been created in a classroom".
This insightful comment, from one of the most respected professors of management today, is fully supported by all the research in the UK over many years. Effective leadership is only ever learnt in the workplace, on the job, experientially and by reflecting on practice (as yet more research has conclusively shown). As Mintzberg says in his blog, it should be about "learning and doing...learning connected to ongoing experience" in the workplace.
What is the point of classroom-based leadership development courses?
President Barack Obama has been extensively criticised for his leadership style. Rightly so.
Basically, he has not been doing strategic leadership. First, he has not produced the change positions that a strategic leader must develop. Secondly, he has not decided which new change position to support.
For each issue (health, military, banks/loans, education, etc) he should gather and lead a team to determine scenarios, look at the options, then select one and go for it - using political leadership style to overcome the dissenters (at present, political leadership seems to be his only strength).
Given that he was elected on a 'change ticket', he's not showing a great deal of competency in change leadership. Did he never learn leadership when young? Has he never been on a leadership development training course?
Leadership is not only beginning to dominate management thinking as the key skill for the future, pushed along by de-layering, but it is also found to be positively commercially beneficial.
For instance, see Kur and Bunning’s three-track leadership development process where participants study in parallel leadership, business and personal development, which has yielded cost savings and revenue improvements, successful project implementation and enhanced credibility of participants due to enhanced leadership competence.
Ref: Kur Ed and Bunning Richard (1996). Athree-track process for executive leader development. Leadership &Organization Development Journal, 17, 4, pp 4-12.
There are literally hundreds of definitions of leadership.
After seven and a half years PhD level study including a leadership literature review by Roddy Mullin, the conclusion drawn is that:
“Leadership is visionary, it is the projection of personality and character to inspire, persuade, compel, transform the team, dependent on the situation to achieve the desired outcome through the selection of an appropriate leadership style. The successful leader is an individual who has acquired individual enabling skills especially communication and setting the example and learnt to understand him/herself, the organisation, the environment in which they operate and the people that they are privileged to lead.”
