‘A match made in heaven’ by Russell Deathridge and Marija Potter, Training Journal, June 2011

I chose this article from TJ because it was a change from the usual repetitive contributions by training consultants who tell us yet again that training needs to be focussed on business needs or that there is a wonderful new approach to evaluation. The authors are from Kenexa, a US consultancy who seem to have established a reputation for leadership development and who are working with several of our clients. They tackle the long standing debate about the difference between management and leadership and then move on to discuss the more practical issue; once you have defined each one, can you and should you separate their training?

The article starts with some useful retracing of the history of management thinking, which took me back to my early Ashridge days (I recall a joke that, if you were five minutes late for the Principal’s lecture on this subject, you missed the first 100 years!) The authors quote Fayol’s definition of management as forecasting, planning, organisation, commanding, coordinating and controlling, thinking which led to management being seen as a scientific process. Only those at the very top were expected to worry about people and culture, which were seen as separate issues.

We are then reminded that it was Mintzberg who first began to see management in behavioural terms with his suggestion of three core areas - interpersonal, informational and decisional. And this thinking gathered pace to the point where it is now taken for granted that managers at almost any level are responsible for the development of their people, and for integrating the hard and the soft elements of the role.

Having made an interesting if rather theoretical start, the article then goes much too deeply into more theory, suggesting eight different theories of leadership which are too obscure and overlapping to be of interest to the average learning professional. The conclusion of all this theory is the assertion that the responsibilities of the average manager today are much more complex and challenging than 50 years ago. In addition to the greater people responsibilities, there is the need to understand a global environment and to be measured by a wider range of KPIs, not just financial metrics.

I was still thinking ‘so what’ when we finally got to the point on the third page of the article. The key argument is that the barriers between management and leadership have broken down and the two elements should be seen as an integrated continuum. This seems rather obvious but the authors then make the point that most management training design assumes that these elements of a manager’s responsibilities can be divided, with either separate courses or an ‘integrated’ programme with separate sessions on hard and soft skills.

This is certainly something that we have seen in a number of companies and business schools and we try very hard to avoid such separations in our course designs and material development. For instance we frequently develop business simulations and exercises/case studies that combine finance with communication skills. The authors accept the importance of integrated design but suggest that their key factor for integration is the way the facilitator operates, acting as instructor for management topics and facilitator for leadership, looking at present day management problems while also looking forward to future strategic issues.

The article makes this point effectively and is well written, but I would have preferred to see less coverage of theory up front and more on the implications for programme design and learning outcomes.

Click here to read the article in full:

http://www.trainingjournal.com/feature/articles-features-2011-06-01-a-match-made-in-heaven/