The book discusses leadership in chapter seven and points out the difficulty of defining a "leader."
This issue was recently brought home to me in our department. Due to downsizing, the position of manager and supervisor were eliminated, leaving an inexperienced lead, and a director. Recently, a loud argument broke out between two employees in close proximity to both their offices, about a work related issue, yet neither one intervened. The lead later confided in me that he had not known what to do to diffuse the situation. The director also did nothing other than to ask the lead: "what was all that about?" Leadership is not the same as heavy handed control, but I feel it's the director's role to mentor and support less experienced staff members rather than ignore conflicts among the staff.
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2 comments:
It is really complicated to define what a leader is. I thought I could come up with a definition, but after reading chapter 7 the conceptualizations leader and leadership got a little mixed up in my mind. After reading some passages of chapter 7 twice I was able to understand it better.
I have observed similar scenarios in my Human Resources journey. Many people are promoted to leader positions, such as team lead, but they are not trained for that. Hence, they do not quite know how to manage conflicts in the workplace. And because so many management positions have been eliminated, directors do not always have time to teach team leaders how to be good leaders.
Consequently, what we see is a bunch of inexperienced staff members playing leaders, but totally lost on how to handle conflicting situations within their groups.
I too have witnessed many situations such as the one you describe in your blog. I often wondered why people with no leadership skills were promoted to higher positions. Wouldn't leadership skills be required to be promoted? I finally decided to think that these people probably excelled in some other areas which is why they were promoted to Director or VP positions. I have observed that higher management in my company have excellent analytical skills yet they have no leadership skills at all. I guess people do not have to be great in every areas, only in the ones that their management care about.
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