Leaders and Managers – is there a distinction
Suntop Media recently did an interview with Henry Mintzberg, renowned corporate strategist wich touched on his book, Managers Not MBAs.
You can read the interview here.
What I was most interested in though was Mintzberg’s comments about whether leadership was an innate skill or whether it can be learned.
He said:
Can you learn leadership, or do you think it´s an innate quality?
Well, you learn it in the sense of experiences and exposures, challenges, and all those sorts of things. That’s how you learn leadership. Nobody has ever been made into a leader in the classroom. Courses that claim to create leaders are dishonest. You can’t create a leader in the classroom. What you can do is take people and enhance their managerial skills, and enhance their understanding of their job, if they are already in positions of leadership.
And I am totally against this notion that you can separate managers from leaders. This implies that leaders don’t have to manage, which means that leaders don’t have to know what is going on intimately in their organisation. Which is wrong.
Nobody wants managers who aren’t leaders. So why would we want leaders who aren’t managers, leaders who don’t know what is going on, who aren’t connected. It’s a phony distinction.
So is it a phony distinction?
Everyone in their career would have had a Manager who is not a leader, but can you separate the leader from the manager? I’d be interested in your views.
You can’t learn leadership, neither is it an innate quality: read this fantastic article “why your boss is programmed to be a dictator”, which examines leadership from a system’s angle. You can get the article free at http://www.changethis.com/19.BossDictator
Anyone who claims to be a leader should read it!