Epic Think Tank
Leadership for the Top Team
Learning from the post-boy
A second thing that leaders and potential leaders
seem to share as a group is a heightened sense of discrimination
when it comes to the provenance of knowledge.
One facet of this discrimination is a scepticism,
and even a distrust, which is at root a tough-minded disinclination
to simply accept what one is given - or to take any information
at face value.
This scepticism can be so intense that leaders often
distrust their own knowledge. A delegate round the table from one
of the UK's foremost management schools asked a group of mature
MBAs what they had learned from the experience of doing the course.
Nothing, it transpired, that they hadn't known or suspected already.
However, the course had equipped them with massive reserves of confidence
in their own judgement, which came from having tested their empirically-gathered
knowledge against the best available authorities.
For some leaders, this will not be tough-minded enough.
Leaders in general have high expectations of authority, and a limited
ability for blind compliance. They're not going to accept the corporate
leadership programme without question: they're going to want to
know how it stacks up against 'real' education. They want the best
(and they want it now).
Where what is on offer doesn't measure up, very often
the favoured route will be a return to original sources via the
DIY route: which will in practice mean falling back on Amazon.com.
A lot of CEO learning doesn't look like learning, simply because
it eschews the formal constraints of 'the course', resulting in
a lot of bookish behaviour and ad hoc knowledge gathering.
Many leaders are great knowledge managers, because
they are able to cope with the inherently chaotic conditions one
finds at nodal points of the information flow. Chaos is full of
opportunities for leaders, and that's why you'll always find them
wherever the information is flowing thickest and fastest. It may
not seem like a course; it may not even look like learning - but
it's learning none the less.
This discrimination over provenance makes leaders
tend to prefer the trusted source - the prestigious educational
brand, the seasoned CEO lecturer - but it also makes them wary of
taking just one opinion. Why not consult the internet, where there
are millions of opinions (shortly after the internet achieved critical
mass, it started to be noted that corporate leaders were among the
most enthusiastic users within their organisations). Peer learning
is an important source of knowledge for those who do not readily
truckle to authority.
Neither are leaders, as impatient people, always prepared
to wait for ideas to achieve the respectability that comes with
age. An important engine of leader learning is the ceasesless search
for new, quicker, cheaper ways of doing things.
So who, exactly, does a Jack Welch or a Richard Branson
choose to learn from? Surely there can't be too many people around
in their organisations who know more than they do themselves?
The answer is: the post-boy.
Pete Waterman, the pop impresario, claims that he
has made more money-spinning decisions off the back of what the
post-boys in record companies tell him they think than on the judgements
offered by heads of A&R. Both Welch and Branson have reputations
for seeking out the youngest and lowliest in their organisations
to find out what they know. Some companies enshrine this in process,
by having the top team mentored by 24-year olds within the organisation.
It is risky, of course, learning from the young, who
tend to have a higher risk profile than greyer heads (and often
come a cropper in consequence). But leadership, as we've seen in
previous Think Tanks on the subject, is intimately bound up with
risk. The shocks and scares most of us try to avoid in life are
meat and drink to top leaders. They like making their own judgements,
even when they're wrong; and the shock of the new provides a more
thrilling stimulus to them than the me-too mindset of best practice.
However, getting ideas is one thing; avoiding old
mistakes another: where is the support mechanism that, while keep
leaders learning, will stop them haring off down false paths? In
this democratic age, no leader is self-sufficient enough, surely,
to be able to do without the odd bit of guidance? And who is going
to tell them when they're wrong?
At this level, and with the unique intensity of the
soft skills issues that present themselves to leaders, this sort
of development is liable to have an extremely high teacher-pupil
ratio. One to one, in fact: we're talking executive coaching...
Next>>
Introduction
Cometh the hour, cometh the...MBA?
Tough love for top leaders
Conclusion
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