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« The Nature of Leadership | Leading Blog Main Page | Neurogenesis: Environment Matters to the Brain » 10.24.06
Henry Mintzburg and Frank Brown on Teaching LeadershipThe Financial Times published yesterday in a special section on Business Education a leadership debate between Henry Mintzburg and Frank Brown that has gotten a lot of attention. At the core of what he takes issue with is the way leadership is portrayed. And rightly so. He has a problem with leaders being presented as “the great one who rides in on a white horse.” It gives the impression that the leader did it all by themselves. He adds: “We have too much of this leadership apart—the hyped-up, individually focused, context-free leadership so popular in the classrooms as well as the press. Courses and MBA programmes that claim to create leaders all too often promote hubris instead. No leader has ever been created in a classroom.” How true. Leadership studies do need to be reconsidered. The current methodology no doubt lead Stanford’s James March to say the following in a recent interview in the Harvard Business Review: I doubt that “leadership” is a useful concept for serious scholarship. The idea of leadership is imposed on our interpretation of history by our human myths, or by the way we think that history is supposed to be described. As a result, the fact that people talk about leaders and attribute importance to them is neither surprising nor informative. Leadership can not be taught in the sense that a person can sit in a classroom and walk away a leader any more than one can read a leadership book every week and call themselves a leader. It is possible, however, to teach principles, to lay the groundwork for a way of thinking and to create awareness of traits and characteristics. But until a person combines all of that with their own thinking and character, making it a part of who they are, they are not a leader. And that simply takes time and practice. There is no short-cut to leadership. The leadership journey is an ongoing journey into self-knowledge or awareness. It is a process of reflection to see where you stand in relation to where you should be and determining the steps you need to take in order to get there. Mintzberg’s problem with the conventional MBA classroom is the way it is taught—overemphasizing the science at the expense of its practice and the kinds of “leaders” it tends to generate—MBAs that are too young, and have too little experience to appreciate what they are being taught. That is to say, it tends to produce heroic-type leaders that have no experience to fully understand the world they are charging-in to. As Mark Twain said, "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." It is astonishing how much these “leaders” find there is to learn after they’ve been out in the workplace for a while that never found a place—or they were never able to make a connection to—in the classroom.  To get the experience and practice necessary to become leaders, Frank Brown, dean of Insead, writes, “Indeed, true leaders are committed mentors and supporters for training and development initiatives that allow employees to climb the leadership ladder.” He continues: Simply said, the last thing the business world needs is more managers. On the contrary, it is in need of more leaders. On teaching leadership in the classroom you might take a look at Leadership Can Be Taught by Shanon Daloz Parks regarding Ronald Heifetz’s efforts at Harvard. An important book in the area of leadership development is Welter and Egmon’s book, The Prepared Mind of the Leader, for this is where leadership really begins.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:42 AM
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Comments
This may be one of the most important questions ever discussed. Why as Professor Marsh asserts should we take the subject of leadership "seriously". I am not surprised because I have often commented to myself, "how can it be that with so many books on leadership, there appears to be a dearth of it everywhere." Yet, I know that the problem is not the ubiquity of books addressing the subject. Leadership is not about a classroom experience, a series of books, styles or personality. Leaders are not born nor are they made. It is not nurture vs nature. The act of leadership is not about titles nor roles nor positions. Leadership is merely the incidental moments where courage meets opportunity. The courage to act, speak, not act, not speak. It is often said, luck is where preparedness meets opportunity. Leadership is where courage meets opportunity. A life spent preparing ie) reading, studying, reflecting, acting can affect the degree of courage a person is able to muster as the opportunity arises. The courage to admit you have made a mistake, the courage to say no when everyone else says yes, the courage to make your best decision unsure of the consequences but sure of the gravity, the courage to forgive when others hate, the courage to be silent when everyone else wants to talk, the courage to face reality and yes the courage to have faith. Yes, courage. So I say to Dr. Marsh, we do not have enough books, enough teachers or enough colleges to begin to address the subject of leadership. We have only begun to scratch the surface on a subject whose boundaries are all world history, all religious acts and studies, all acts by humanity, all creations of art and literature and science ad infinitum and growing. All acts of courage and all merely degrees of leadership. And where you find fear, you will find all of leadership's failures.
Posted by: Matthew Laos | October 25, 2006 10:31 PM
Heard the interview you gave on CBC Sunday morning. What a relief to hear what many of us in engineering have been thinking for so long. The MBA syndrome is well known within the ranks of the IT industry, and we suffer from it daily. One of its symptoms is the "enterprise architecture" fad where the IT business relationship is "distilled" into a set of diagrams, typically before and after pictures, where the "before" is a complex web and the "after" a miraculous simplification, used to justify revamping the historical "cruft" which is hard to understand by these folks. This often results in unnecessary damage but allows the exec to leave their mark. An IT re-org. I remember sitting next to a Bell Labs exec at a conference and his comment was that research decline in the US can be mapped to the ascent of MBA graduate to science/engineering graduate ratio. I was toying with the idea of writing a set of stories based on the related absurdities I've seen in many companies (slightly masked to avoid lawsuits), but I think that I'll read your publications first so as not to repeat things. Lastly, I want to mention that I am currently in the throes of another re-org, now at the government, led by a recently hired top executive from the private sector, that likes to be briefed in one page or less and who was extremely critical of our operation from the first month on, and who is now hiring external consultants to give advice. The irony is that they are giving advice derived from position papers that we have had since 2005, but repackaged into one page missives with pretty graphics.
Posted by: Mistermeta | April 12, 2009 08:51 AM