Leadership
Can You Teach Leadership?.
I read Fast Company yesterday. The
actual magazine, that is, not the web site and not selected articles
fed through a news aggregator. It's been a long time since I
held a magazine in my hands. Not bad. The September issue (no links
yet) focuses
on courage and leadership. It's well worth a look.
I was struck by David Halberstam's piece, "The Greatness that Cannot be
Taught." I'd actually put Halberstam among those who are
great for his
reporting from Vietnam and a dozen or so subsequent books on history,
culture, and politics. Quite a run. I don't know him, but he seems to
be an authentic guy. In his Fast Company article, he talks about some
leaders
he's known or covered over the years and comes to this conclusion:
The truth is that in
most fields, it's a natural process. Leaders are men and women who have
chosen the right profession. They're good at it, and because
they're good at it, they like it, and because they like it, they're
even
better at it. They're so good at it that they'd rather work
than play.
They're naturals, and excelling comes naturally as well. They've
understood their field from the start, and they've studied it without
even knowing they've studied it.
I love it. A wonderful and simple description lacking all the puffy
intellectual pretense I usually hear when listening to conversations
about leadership. The
line about "choosing the right profession" comes up over and over
again the more I explore this. It seems like an absolute requirement
for success (whatever your definition of success is). And from what
we'll see below, leadership skills are not
necessarily transferable between professions, which is a lesson I
think I've finally internalized.
Halberstam continues:
What
they have is precious -- nothing less than a gift.... But often, they
don't become serious until midcareer, because their own talent
surprises them -- they were not that brilliant when they were in
college or just starting out. Academic
excellence, after all, rarely translates into professional success, and
the special intelligence that makes leaders thrive in their field is
not necessarily an intelligence that transfers well into other fields.
They are extremely well prepared, and they push themselves hard. Most
crucial to leadership, they give off a unique aura, the sum of their
confidence, their tone of voice, their feeling for command.
Wow. Thank you. I finally get this part ... I've been struggling with
that "transferable" bit for years. So, the lesson for me is this -- do
what you love to do and you'll naturally become great if you have the
drive and the desire. If potential leadership is
already within you, that will emerge during the process of diving
deeply into
what comes naturally. Now, since I don't aspire to leadership, but
simply want to be great at something (one thing, not many ... I HATE the brain-dead concept
of "multi-tasking"), I can use this very same thought process to follow
that path. 
Halberstam also talks about how leaders
maneuver through situations and how
different times literally demand different
leaders. He cites one of his personal heroes -- U.S. General
Matthew Bunker Ridgway, a key field commander during the Korean War. To
contrast Ridgway, Halberstam uses General
Douglas MacArthur, whose greatness grew from WWII, obviously, and
his almost impossible Inchon landing in Korea. But after Inchon,
however, MacArthur seemed to lose it. Despite the
bombastic MacArthur, the Chinese were simply not going away. And
MacArthur's ego, arrogance, insubordination, and miscalculations simply
weren't getting
the job done in the field. And men were dying as a result. Times
had, indeed, changed and the old leadership seemed incapable of doing
anything about it.
 In comes Ridgway to take command of the battered Eighth
Army. Unlike
MacArthur, who seemed more interested in self promotion and positioning
himself above the chain of command, Ridgway was a front line,
in-your-face commander. You'd find him out with his guys, not posing
for pictures and re-creating scenes for history.
Halberstam writes:
Ridgway
was courageous, but he was also instructive to us as a reflection of a
new kind of military leader. In retrospect, MacArthur, the man he would
soon replace as allied commander in the Far East, seems like a leader
from another century: He was
always busily engaged in cultivating his own personal mystique as a
great man, the Great MacArthur who was head and shoulders above all
other generals. The idea was that because he was such a great
general, those who he led were also great and would now fight well
because he was leading them.
But ...
Ridgway
was different, a leader for the new, modern era. His leadership was of
a more egalitarian kind, premised on letting the men fighting under him
find something within themselves that made them tough and combat-ready.
The point of his leadership was
not that they would think that he was a great general -- although in
time
they did -- but that they would fight well because they were now more
confident about who they were and what their mission was, and
confident, too, that they were tough and well prepared. And in a
stunningly short time, he turned the Eighth Army around and made it a
remarkable fighting force, one that could stalemate the vastly superior
number of Chinese.
My take away from all this is simple -- watch out for those so-called
leaders living in ivory
towers who preach leadership but only from the perspective of
themselves. They are so easy to spot. Like MacArthur. Instead, engage
and
learn from the leaders who get down in the mud with you and
lead by the inspiration of direct example. Those guys, too, are pretty
easy to spot.
So, what do you think ... can you teach this? Can you teach leadership
at this level? Or is it simply
revealed from within when the right time and the right circumstances
meet?
I'm squarely on the side of the natural leader. Perhaps it can be
taught to those who already have it but who need help finding it. But
other than that, you have it or you don't. What I really like about
this line of thinking, however, is not necessarily the study of
leadership itself, but instead, the study of individual greatness.
Natural
leaders like Halberstam's Ridgway tend to be exceptional individuals.
However, is it possible to be an exceptionally talented individual but
one who is not necessarily considered a potential leader? I think so.
I'm betting on it.
[Jim Grisanzio]
8:14:48 PM 
|
|
