Please, Lord, not another trademarked leadership concept
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I found an article in Conde Nast Portfolio titled "Building a Leadership Brand" which is actually a summary of a July article from the Harvard Business Review which could be purchased part of an article collection and is a brief treatment of the material (one supposes) in a book by the same name. I thought it was an intriguing title, since I had no idea what a "leadership brand" was.
I still don't. I've read the article. I've even turned the page upside down to see if it made more sense that way. It didn't. But it did remind me of what I dislike about so much of what passes for leadership literature and leadership development concepts.
I don't like that everybody's got to have some hook of a brand-like name for what they do. It seems to me that Peter Drucker managed to do a successful job of teaching us a few things without needing a fancy name for what he did.
The basics of great leadership haven't changed much since Plutarch was writing about them. We don't need more "creative" ways to write about leadership. We need more good leaders we can use as role models, examples and mentors.
We don't need grandiose statements like the following which is described as only one of the five fundamentals of leadership. "Personal proficiency: acting with integrity, exercising social and emotional intelligence, making bold decisions, and engendering trust."
The article suggests we can train leaders to master, not just one, but all five fundamentals. Nonsense.
We don't need training on ethereal concepts like "acting with integrity." We do need leaders who act with integrity so that their juniors know what integrity looks like. We do need leaders we can describe the way Howell Raines described Bear Bryant: "Coach Bryant had an idea about how a man ought to act and if you watched him, you could figure it out."
And we really don't need more training except in basic supervisory skills for first time and front line leaders. We do need more development using an apprentice model where developing leaders get to try things out and receive feedback from results, their bosses and subordinates, and their peers. We do need an apprentice model that gives developing leaders temporary and permanent assignments so they can develop on the job.
So here's a call for less slick concepts and more attention to the basics of how leaders act and how they learn their trade.
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Wally,
Well, I read the article. Good grief, how many times can the pap that passes for "expert" advice be re-cycled so that well-intentioned managers never get what they need to be genuinely effective.
At the risk of appearing old school, what ever happened to telling, showing, and helping people learn how to supervise/manage/lead--whatever? Every successful executive I've interviewed immediately offers up the name of some manager, early on, upon whom (s)he emulated. No one--CEO's included--has ever ever used the terms leadership brand, leadership model, behavioral example...it's always been "Joe Lowery in engineering showed me how to run a meeting and supervise a crew."
I remember landing my first managerial job at a Fortune 50 company. After a while, I asked directly why they hired me vs. other candidates. The answer: "You were a sergeant in the Army. We know that you know how to get people on the same page." I was never asked to do anything differently or with a slogan attached.
What's most surprising is, that after nearly 30 years of pop-management literature, the same issues are simply being re-packaged and re-labeled, with little or no change in substance. Yet the cries continue for "more effective leadership" and "stop the leadership crisis."
Perhaps the "leadership" industry is a contributing cause...
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Steve,
Thanks for a great comment. When I interviewed top performing supervisors, they all mentioned early role models as a primary influence.
Maybe we should start a movement, "Sergeants and Centurions against the Leadership Industry."
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I'm in total agreement, of course. My tiny problem is that so many of the managers and supervisors I've coached had literally no one as an early role model who showed them the ropes, and the problem is worsening every day.
Not many of my folks are readers, though, so I still wonder who the market is for that stuff.
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Thanks, Shaun.
Having a bad boss as your first boss can create a vicious cycle of bad supervision. In the short term it helps to have a supervisor identify someone they think is a good boss, or who they experienced as a good boss. Then they can tease out what that boss did that make him or her good. The good boss can also become a role model.
In the longer term there are aspects to the apprentice model I advocate that can deal with that issue. If we select managers who have the aptitude to succeed in a leadership position, one of the aptitudes we'll select for is "helping others succeed." We'd be more likely to get more good bosses that way and more likely to have those bosses sensitive to helping other, newer leaders.
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I’ve been a big fan of apprenticeship ever since I started doing this work because it seems so clearly congruent with the way actual people actually learn.
And I’ve always liked your notion that managing people is an aptitude that should be recognized, reinforced, and rewarded in organizations. But few organizations are really prepared to get rid of a manager who might otherwise be technically competent, a hard worker, an “earner” etc. They just won’t do it.
Which is why I also agree with the idea of a separate, non-supervisory track for people with no affinity for managing humans. But is that realistic?
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It's hard to describe how dispiriting it is to see this sort of - well, "pap" will have to do - keeps up its momentum. I have to agree with Steve most emphatically, and add that the modern leadership industry is not just a contributing cause, but that it and the self-referential academic loonies that feed it are the principal inspiration and support for a lot of awful leadership that has produced a lot of awful results, not to mention awful effects in people's lives. They are all brand and no leadership.
But the "sergeants and centurions" approach to leadership - and not just against the modern leadership movement - there's a brand I would buy.
The idea that "leaders" should have personal characteristics and abilities that distinguish them as ineluctably superior to the rest of us is obnoxious and ultimately destructive - certainly unproductive. Moreover, as Shaun points out, the notion that "leadership" is the only ultimate aim of a career is the same.
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What a great thread. Couldn't agree more. We are all built as learning organisms, and simply need to make sure we nurture a learning habit that makes us better over time. I recently met a few Marine Corps, who most of all valued the real-time decision-making skills they had to quickly develop and grow over the years.
Jargon is often an obstacle for growth.
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Your observations are spot on. Whether we like it or not, corporate slavery is here. It is designed to keep people enslaved as long as the organization needs them. It is packaged in many varieties, but the result is always the same-no lasting change.
If corporate America (not all corporations)wanted better leaders, managers or supervisors they would go to the sound principles you stated. But they know that to do that would invite freedom. Leading people who are free is the ultimate test of your influence. And after decades of this corruption, I don't think many corporate leaders would do well in an environment where people's eyes are wide open.
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