At some point in the rise of the modern leadership movement, and the ensuing profit-making industry, leadership and management were set on divergent courses, with leadership presented as the brilliant star and management as the subservient drudges.
The results of this extreme focus on vision and influence are being felt globally in the form of the economic meltdown led by the Wall Street leadership who were above the mundane and wouldn’t dirty their hands with the gritty details of management.
In a brilliant opinion piece, Henry Mintzberg, Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University, founding partner of Coaching Ourselves and author …read more

Have you ever thought about what leadership sounds like?
Real leadership makes no noise.
Real leadership goes quietly about its tasks.

Real leadership doesn’t announce itself or blather on about what it plans to do in the future.
Real leadership isn’t a pied piper that mesmerizes you to follow along on its journey.
Real leadership happens every day all around you; it’s done by your colleagues, those you pass on the street and the people in your home.
So the next time you hear leadership be suspicious, be very suspicious.
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Image credit: user_fizik on sxc.hu

Real leadership is found in everyday actions and the way you choose to live. You can’t dictate how others do it or how they perceive you, you can only control and direct yourself.
Today I offer up two ways you can lead.
If each of you do them and encourage three friends to do them and they each draw in three more and on and on we can make one hell of a difference.
First, the Four Freedoms Franklin Delano Roosevelt described in his State of the Union speech on the eve of WWII in 1941 seem to be on the wane in …read more

I have a great idea to make the world a better place.
Everybody who aspires to the cult of all-knowing leader stops.
Everybody who longs for an all-knowing leader embraces the reality that no such thing exists. (Jim Stroup has an excellent discussion on this that started June 8 at Managing Leadership. I highly recommend it.)
Replacing these, everybody would

learn leadership skills;

apply them constantly to themselves; and

occasionally in the outside world as circumstances dictated;

take responsibility for their own actions and decisions; and

partner with others as equals, whether one was in front or behind at any given time.

Not that I think there’s a chance …read more

Post from Leadership Turn Image credit: Daniel Voyager from TSL
An interesting post over at Collab@work led me to the Executive Summary of an HBS study on how multiplayer games hone leadership skills.
“…the authors studied people who headed up teams in online games. They also sought the insights of gamers who have led real-world business teams at IBM.”
“The authors identified three distinctive characteristics of leadership in online games that, as workplaces and the overall business climate become more dynamic and gamelike, will be essential for tomorrow’s leaders: speed, risk taking, and acceptance of leadership roles as temporary.”
It is the last …read more