Leadership Development Seminars

Three kinds of management experience are known to be effective in developing leadership skills: challenging assignments, significant bosses and hardships. Unfortunately these experiences cannot be left to happen by chance and they don’t work automatically – organizations need to create career paths that expose young managers to these kinds of events as well as prepare them to benefit from those experiences. This is where management concepts have their place – in the preparation of managers to learn from their experience. Even then, concepts are best taught experientially, that is, in simulations that are relevant to the business and contexts where managers can get timely, specific feedback on their behaviors and their actions, preferably from peers and mentors. I use a wide variety of cases from leading business schools, videos, simulations and feedback instrumentation, each of which is tailored to the needs of the organization and the specific learning objectives to be accomplished

One advantage of an ecological or systems approach to management is that concepts can be presented as parts of an integrated whole, avoiding the fragmented approach so prevalent in many organizations, where initiatives are often introduced piecemeal. I like to take the frameworks with which an organization is working and show how they are related to each other – systemically – this makes for a much more coherent implementation process. Some recent management innovations such as the Balanced Scorecard are designed to be systemic but their systemic nature has to be understood in depth i.e. by people at every level, if organizations are to avoid mindless data gathering and number-crunching. Some recent work on innovation by Clayton Christensen and his colleagues at Harvard Business School is highly compatible with my frameworks and I have modules designed to incorporate it into the seminars.

The second advantage of systems approach is the importance attached to the organization’s history and to learning in general. Many management experts have a tendency to represent corporate competencies – capabilities developed through processes of learning – as strategies – courses of action that can be imposed on organizations without the need for learning. Similarly, I have seen many change efforts that tried to start with a “clean slate,” pretending that little of importance has happened in the past and that organizations could redesign their processes, values and even their cultures from scratch. These interventions rarely lead to sustainable change because deeply embedded habits have a way of reasserting themselves when the focus of change moves off them. Despite its popularity, much corporate benchmarking falls into this trap. Benchmarking against other organizations can show a firm that change is possible; it rarely shows how that change can be realized in the particular firm.

I like to prepare a sound historical perspective of the organization’s past so that everyone can understand the present situation – understanding the present as well as the dynamics of natural systems is the key to understanding the future – not for the purpose of prediction but to create a shared context for taking action. This usually requires a study of annual reports, marketing and planning documents and corporate histories and cases, if available, on both the firm and the industries to which it either belongs or against which it compares itself.

A third advantage of a systems approach to management is the ease with which it allows management concepts to be understood across cultures. I find that concepts travel much better when they are embedded in a systems framework, allowing participants to understand both the strengths and weaknesses of every framework. This is particularly true of the work I have done in Europe, Hong Kong and China.