Posted by Celia Couture on Wed, Jul 07, 2010 @ 09:18 AM
As much as our business school educations thought they would prepare us for management, we soon learn that whatever might have been placed in a textbook is NOT reality. Strong management skills are learned though experience.
A classroom is a place to share management practices, debate the latest styles of management, but it is not the place where managers learn how to be socially responsible business leaders. The recent BP disaster on the Gulf Coast is a good example. I'm sure the BP CEO is a great guy, but his choice of words and his immediate response to the disaster was not what people needed to hear.
Business leaders are under attack as a result of their response to the economic crisis. Many have been criticized for putting their own interests ahead of those of employees, customers, and even stock holders.
It's time for business manager to take an inventory of what they need to lead! Typically, business managers are promoted based upon their functional expertise. Is it fair to assume that if you are a wonderful sales person, you can easily make the transition to a great sales manager? A manager must have the ability to integrate skills that help to define effective and strong leadership ability as well as functional knowledge.
It took an educational crisis in the United States before curriculum change occurred. It may take the same effort to engage our prestigious, business schools to begin looking at how they prepare managers to lead. In a recent article written by Richard Barker for the Harvard Business Review, he writes, " The key is to recognize that integration is learned rather than taught: it takes place in the minds of MBA students, who link the various elements of the program. Business education is not one-size-fits-all, and, most important, it should be collaborative rather than competitive."
Posted by Celia Couture on Thu, Aug 20, 2009 @ 09:30 AM
The recent issue of HR Magazine had an interesting article with the following title: When Women Rank High, Companies Profit. The article talked about conducting a survey of 1,500 U.S. companies to investigate the connection between female senior management and company performance. David Ross of Columbia University Business School and Christian Dezso at teh University of Maryland examined such performance based on market-to-book ratio, return on assets, retun on equity and annual sales growth from 1992 to 2006. They looked at postion up to, but not including, the CEO level but separately studeis these performance measures in companies that had female CEOs.
The research suggests promoting women to top ranks may help the bottom Line. For those of us who are currently in executive roles in companies or for those of us who own and operate our own companies, these statistics are not at all surprising. Women work hard each day to prove that they belong in executive roles. Consequently, they typically pay more attention to the details, work very hard at creating a collaborative work environment and they hire people who share the same cultural values.
Ross and Dezso refer to the "female participating effect" as being of particular strenght in companies with a strong emphasis on research and development. "The positve impact is found in firms that are invovled with innovation, where a democratic and participatory approach to management is known to be important."
If you have an opportunity to work through your business plan and ensure that the women in your organization have the oppotunity to lead major initiatives, have access to decision-makers and can demonstrate their abilities to think strategically just having a single femail is positively associate with better company performance.