Transforming Managers into Leaders Ready for Strategic Action

There are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are people who have attempted to define the concept. According to John Kotter of Harvard Business School, management is about coping with complexity and leadership is all about coping with change.

Good management brings about order and consistency by drawing up formal plans, designing rigid organization structures, and monitoring results against plan. On the other hand, leaders establish direction by developing a vision of the future: then they align people by communicating this vision and inspiring them to overcome hurdles. Peter Drucker has long pointed out that managers are people who do things right; leaders are people who do the right things. However, for a company to be under led and over managed could be as dangerous as for a company to be over led and under managed; therefore, the ideal is a combination of solid management and clever leadership.

Leadership can be better understood if we focus on various roles performed by the leaders. In his book “General Manager Performance", Kotter has mentioned that all effective general managers were found to be ambitious, achievement orientated, comfortable with power, emotionally stable, temperamentally optimistic, above average in intelligence, moderately strong, analytically and intuitively strong, personable, good at developing relationships with people and able to relate to a broad set of business specialists. They were also very knowledgeable about their businesses and organizations, and have set of good working relationships with a very large number of people in their companies.

These competencies can be classified into two categories.
Surface Elements of Competencies
This involves skills and knowledge required to perform the managerial work. These kinds of competencies can be easy amended for development

Core Elements of Competencies
This involves core motives, traits, behavior, characteristic features and attitudes. These kinds of competencies are relatively difficult to amend for development.

The leading companies in the west have come to realize that ultimate source of sustainable competitive advantages are through leaders who keep learning. Hence these companies are investing in leadership development programs that help key executives learn leadership skill. As early as 1993, Business Week estimated that $17 billion was being spent annually on helping managers develop thought processes and company special skill that could enable them to move up and lead their business areas. Besides making huge investment world-class executives are investing significant amount of their time, personally guiding and mentoring future leaders. These world-class executives consider leadership development not a luxury but a strategic necessity.

The Sloan Management Review, Fall 2000 has summarized leadership development practices adopted by most of the Fortune 100 organizations into basic five steps.

Awareness
The foundation of these companies' leadership development is awareness of external challenges, emerging business opportunities and strategies, internal developmental needs and the ways other leading organizations handle development.

Anticipatory
Top leadership-development companies use anticipatory learning tools such as focus groups that explore potential challenges or the impact of emerging technologies strategic; decentralized strategic (planning that builds on many organizational levels' imagining of the future); Analysis of future scenarios and the Delphi methods (successive rounds of composite predictions used to build awareness and consensus).

Action
Action, not knowledge, is the goal of best practice leadership development processes. They believe that answers to tough questions are not in the instructor head; learner should discover them on the spot. Before the course begins the firm gives participants real life business problems and protocol for interviewing the clients. Learners work in a team to develop client recommendations and make a presentation to the actual clients after the course.

Aligning
The best practice organization integrate and align the leadership development with other corporate functions like assessment, development, feedbacks, coaching, education and succession planning.

Assessing
Finally, the best practice organizations always assess the impact of leadership development process by using numbers of tools and techniques like Kirk Patrick four level model of evaluations, etc.

Some of the leadership development programs that can be undertaken are as follows:

• Initially the leadership needs have to be identified and programs to fulfill these needs should be formulated.
• Formal education to the potential candidates to increase their understanding of environment and to develop confidence to take charge of the position should be encouraged.
• Coaching, counseling, mentoring and seminars should be conducted to refine the surface as well as core elements of competencies.
• The organization can also encourage job rotation of the viable candidates to increase the width of business expansion.
• Conduct self-assessment programs to find out the potential of the employees and introduce career development programs based on such assessment.
• Provide continuous inspirational programs to motivate the staff to encourage managers to take responsibility for their own development.
• The management can also have junior boards to encourage team experience and develop leadership quality in the staff.

Although the development of special assets in top managers will take very long time, it will invariably take the organization a long way. After all the top managers were not "made" overnight, nor were they simply "born". They are developed over many years.

Truth about the Practice of Management

In Truth about Management Education, we talk about the problems faced by MBA students. The problem is real and solutions are not easy. But, for whatever they are worth, here are some suggestions for making management education more relevant to the concerns of real-world managers.

a) Course structure
In the MBA course, let's bring in more areas related to what the new MBAs would be doing in their first few years. This means - more exposure to aspects of law as it applies to business (statutory legal frameworks, maybe of several neighboring countries, contract laws and so forth) as well as a composite course called "commercial management". This would include all the nitty-gritty of daily business that gets swept aside in the MBA programme - how does one open a letter of credit? How do you start a business - what permissions are required? What are the ways in which an organization deals with its suppliers and customers? What does an invoice in a typical manufacturing organization look like? What does a typical agreement in a service industry e.g. a bank, look like? Obviously, given the great variety of commercial situations, everything cannot be simulated in the classroom, but one can be given a close look at the day-to-day reality of the business, which the MBA would be immersed in, once he/she joins an organization.

b) Faculty
The insistence of PhDs as faculty by many institutions has severely impacted the real-world experience profile of faculty in the classroom. In areas such as economics, such academic background is definitely a huge benefit, but, applied to areas such as marketing, one is almost certain of getting a faculty who is intimately involved in quantitative models and statistical analysis, but who has probably never sold or marketed anything in his or her career. The same considerations apply to areas such as human resources, operations and finance. Visiting faculty can close the gap to some extent, but only partially. The solution is to have full-time faculty with significant managerial experience (who are adequately compensated). After all, would you like to be taught surgery by a medical professor who has never conducted a surgery oneself? Yet, we think nothing of being taught strategic management by professors who have never developed and executed a strategy for an organization (typically a senior management or board responsibility).

c) Interaction with industry
Summer internships and projects, while extremely useful; rarely provide the kind of real-world environment with capabilities and responsibilities, the MBA students require. This is a complicated question, which various forward-thinking schools are trying to address in different ways. Some are proposing breaking up the programme into two parts: the first year followed by a one-year internship in an organization, followed by a second year, by which time the young MBA has a much better appreciation of the real dilemmas and issues of the real world. Others are proposing taking practicing managers out of their assigned roles for two years and immersing them in various learning environments. This approach has been taken by Henry Mintzberg, who firmly believes that management cannot be taught, only experienced and learned, and in his management development programme, only takes in practicing managers. These are exposed to various learning situations in different countries relevant to their working experience and then revert to their original employer.

Whatever be the structure of industry-academic interaction, it is clear that the quantity and quality of real-world exposure of the MBA student has to go up - a lot.

If we study professions such as law, medicine and accounting, it is clear that management theory and practice still has some distance to go before it can be called a profession. Even so, an appreciation of the issues involved in management education would ensure that we are moving in the desired direction - towards a meeting of the real world, where risks are taken, decisions are made and consequences suffered or enjoyed, and the academic world, where such situations are dissected and analyzed.

Truth about Management Education (that your professors did not tell you)

Key issues facing management education
For more than 50 years now, the notion of a newly minted MBA as a "ready-to-go" manager has been accepted across the world. Two (or in some cases, one) years of induction in the arts and science of management is supposed to prepare the young manager for leading change, conquering new markets, introduce new technologies, manage financial complexity and plot grand strategy for the enterprise.

This concept is now coming under attack. Led by vocal critics of the traditional MBA, like Henry Mintzberg, a section of academics have raised several pertinent questions about the differences between managers and MBAs. Some of them are as follows:

a) MBAs without relevant experience are not fit to assume higher responsibility straightaway
This argument holds that only relevant experience in an industry prepares one for a leadership role. An academic degree such as an MBA should just be a way of entering the industry. They should then spend a considerable time mastering the specific issues in an industry before assuming managerial positions.

b) The faculty in MBA programs is unable to bring real-world managerial issues to the classroom
This is a serious criticism related to the fact that, due to increased academic specialization, many management professors today have not set foot within a commercial enterprise in their careers. Also the intense focus on research in many (primarily, American) business schools means that professors concentrate on narrow subjects which may have limited managerial relevance; but these have very positive implications for their careers in terms of publications, obtaining tenure, etc. Hence, the faculty cannot bring to life issues which are very relevant to a practicing manager, but of which the faculty, without own managerial experience, knows little.

c) The issues which MBA students grapple within the classroom are not relevant in the initial stages of their careers
This criticism stems from the fact that many problems or issues framed in the MBA classroom are framed from the perspective of the CEO, Board of Directors or senior management. One of the reasons for this is that many faculty writing management cases, prefer "higher-level" issues and interact with, and write about, problems facing very senior management. However, these issues in many cases arise at such a high level of responsibility that management students would reach it after many years of experience. As an example, how many of us, studying in business school, have taken a company public in the first class (corporate finance course), then in the second class launched a new product in a new category (marketing management course), then in the third session developed a career path for fast-track managers (human resource course), all in the course of one morning! In reality, managers would spend decades developing their careers before they get to make decisions on IPO/Capital structures, New Product Development, and Talent Development, respectively. Simulating these high-level decision­ making situations in the MBA classroom develops a false sense of accomplishment and capability amongst budding managers, whereas they are not equipped with the skills or capabilities to make decisions involving such large stakes, or many variables.