Free Article By Paul Glen of C2
Consulting
Every month we add to this collection of articles from the free monthly
newsletter IT Professionalism.
You are also free to print these articles in your newsletter or magazine if
you follow our Reprint Policy.
To subscribe to it, click here.
Developing the Managerial Mind
(This article originally appeared in
Computerworld USA and Computerworld Australia.)
Recently, I decided to visit the national
convention of the Society of Human Resource Management. The annual SHRM
conference is an astonishingly large gathering of HR professionals and hundreds
of vendors of everything from health insurance to holiday hams, 360-degree
review services, recruitment advertising, Web-based services and training
programs.
I went to see what commercial vendors are
offering in the way of leadership and management development services. Since I
believe that one of the greatest challenges IT departments will face in the next
decade is a leadership gap as baby boom managers retire, I wanted to check out
what the marketplace had to offer to smooth the transition.
Let's just say that I left the conference a bit
overwhelmed by the number of programs on display and underwhelmed by the likely
success of those programs. There were boot camps and coaches, videos and
e-learning programs, self-guided courses and seminars.
But what almost all of them had in common was
their focus on leadership skills. Skills. Skills. Skills. Everything was reduced
to skills. There were courses on things like listening, communicating, writing,
emotional intelligence and "visioning" (I despise that pseudoword). It was as if
someone had set off an M-80 in the leadership section of a Barnes & Noble and
each of the resulting fragments had been turned into a stand-alone curriculum
advertised as the one solution for all your leadership deficits.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm all for skills,
but most of these programs seemed at best to misconstrue and at worst to
willfully obscure the purpose of skills. They are far from the only things that
effective managers need.
What Leaders Need
Leaders need skills much as carpenters need
hammers and drills. Skills are leadership tools. But, as my wife can tell you,
just having a toolbox full of hardware doesn't make me a talented craftsman. The
difference between a handy husband and a master carpenter is not in the hammers,
or even the eyes and the hands, but in the mind.
If you want to grow new leaders, you need to
focus first on developing the managerial mind rather than leadership skills.
Good leaders need a combination of managerial maturity, business acumen, wisdom
and ethics in order to know what to do with skills. They must be able to look at
the world through a number of distinct lenses, synthesize the chaos of reality
into a coherent image and then use leadership skills to move people to positive
action.
Given a choice, I'd take a less skilled but
more thoughtful leader over a highly trained but more limited thinker. A leader
with a good mind and heart can usually overcome a deficit of skills, but an
immature yet skilled manipulator will eventually self-destruct, taking his
organization with him.
Beyond Skills
So, why are there so many programs that focus
on skills rather than mind-set? I suspect that there are good reasons for that.
1. Skills are easy to teach, to encapsulate and
sometimes to measure. Mind-sets are vague and idiosyncratic.
2. Skills are more concrete than mind-sets.
That makes training and development programs easier to sell.
3. Skills can be learned quickly (at least in
theory). In a few hours, anyone can be taught a conceptual model and a few
simple techniques for any skill. Changing minds takes time and patience.
So, what's an earnest leader interested in
developing the managerial potential in his organization to do?
Chances are that no one product on the market
will meet all of your needs. You'll have to construct your own development
program using a combination of best-of-breed commercial products and
custom-developed experiences.
Sound familiar? Building your people
infrastructure is not entirely unlike designing your software infrastructure.
But this shouldn't be surprising. Every organization has its own culture, its
own strategy and its own management style. Generic leadership training, like
packaged software, will go only so far.
So when you start thinking seriously about
developing your leadership bench strength, avoid the skills-only nostrum. Tools
alone are no substitute for insight and ethics -- the products of the educated
and mature managerial mind.
© Copyright 2005 by Computerworld Inc., One
Speen Street, Framingham, MA, 01701. Reprinted by permission of
Computerworld. All Rights Reserved.
