Some great sessions at the IAMC Spring 2012 last week still have me thinking a week later. Specifically they have me thinking about “what is leadership.” These days there are any number of “leadership” experts who talk generally about the topic. The leading groups for this seems to be the Harvard Business Review or Deloitte or McKinsey or some other consulting firm or university. The modern thinking around leadership seems to have done two things: lost touch with science and moved more into the softer realms of “experience based models.”
The argument that I heard made a few times, that resonated with me, is that most modern thinking on leadership is wrong. That we’ve moved so far into the realm as leaders needing an HR mentality that they can’t do the job they are paid to do. They spend too much time thinking about their people or motivations or how to measure productivity that they don’t actually DO anything. Modern leaders aren’t supposed to tell an employee that they aren’t meeting expectations every time they fail to meet expectations – people are supposedly too sensitive. The modern leader is supposedly supposed to focus on each person’s unique strengths and find a way to fit them in – instead of letting that person fit in and adapt to the environment around them themselves. Sure some generalizations, but largely most leaders that I’ve come across recently think this way.
I have to think on this more, but is leadership/management thinking really that far behind the times? I’m thinking that it is.