This blog is written by a member of our blogging community and expresses that member's views alone.
i'm really starting to belive that what we call leadership training and development is really crap. most of it teaches WHAT leadershipis, not HOW to do it. tell me what you think about that statement.
Getting stuff done is really management (GTD is personal management/productivity, a subset).
Leadership, on the other hand, is making the tough decisions that people won't smile at yet, because they don't see far enough ahead or don't understand.
Innovation/change requires leadership, which isn't cultivated in bureaucracies.
Thanks for your resonse Gordon. While I agree with your statements, in general, I am having serious issues with academic attempts to separate leadership and management.
I know it's easy to decompose these to small enough parts that the characteristics of each part can be taught, but getting people to actually put these parts back together in a way that gets stuff done is hardly taught, or discussed at all.
Couple of points: 1) to require "leadership" implies you want someone (or agroup of someones) to do something different than what they are doing now (or else you wouldn't need leadership); 2) doing something different implies a need for different results, and that brings in the management aspect. So, to me being a good leader requires you to be a good manager too, and to be a good manager, you must be a good leader--I've come to believe that separating leadership and management is just wrong.
We must begin to think of leadership and management as two sides of the same coin, and teach one in the context of the other. Unfortunately, today, we teach them as separate concepts, with separate characteristics, and even worse we only (for the most part) teach WHAT they are, not how to get up tomorrow morning and actually DO it.
My thinking now is that "management" describes "what needs to happen" while "leadership" is the "how do we get humans to act" in a way that the stuff actually gets done (and done right). This has brought me back to work I did a few years back in Human Performance Technology, and I'm now developing some thought about how leadership is really about solving human performance problems (gaps in results). I'll write more on this soon .
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Recent Comments | 2 Total
February 26, 2008 at 12:55am by Gordon Vaughan
Hi Chuck, love your blog title!
Getting stuff done is really management (GTD is personal management/productivity, a subset).
Leadership, on the other hand, is making the tough decisions that people won't smile at yet, because they don't see far enough ahead or don't understand.
Innovation/change requires leadership, which isn't cultivated in bureaucracies.
February 26, 2008 at 8:03am by chuck georgo
Thanks for your resonse Gordon. While I agree with your statements, in general, I am having serious issues with academic attempts to separate leadership and management.
I know it's easy to decompose these to small enough parts that the characteristics of each part can be taught, but getting people to actually put these parts back together in a way that gets stuff done is hardly taught, or discussed at all.
Couple of points: 1) to require "leadership" implies you want someone (or agroup of someones) to do something different than what they are doing now (or else you wouldn't need leadership); 2) doing something different implies a need for different results, and that brings in the management aspect. So, to me being a good leader requires you to be a good manager too, and to be a good manager, you must be a good leader--I've come to believe that separating leadership and management is just wrong.
We must begin to think of leadership and management as two sides of the same coin, and teach one in the context of the other. Unfortunately, today, we teach them as separate concepts, with separate characteristics, and even worse we only (for the most part) teach WHAT they are, not how to get up tomorrow morning and actually DO it.
My thinking now is that "management" describes "what needs to happen" while "leadership" is the "how do we get humans to act" in a way that the stuff actually gets done (and done right). This has brought me back to work I did a few years back in Human Performance Technology, and I'm now developing some thought about how leadership is really about solving human performance problems (gaps in results). I'll write more on this soon .
Thanks again for your comments...r/Chuck