Management and Leadership--Is management a profession?
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."