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Art Markman
November 15, 2017
There is a broad assumption in society and in education that the skills you
need to be a leader are more or less transferable. If you can inspire and
motivate people in one arena, you should be able to apply those skills to do
the same in another venue.
But recent research is rightly challenging this notion. Studies suggest that
the best leaders know a lot about the domain in which they are leading, and
part of what makes them successful in a management role is technical
competence. For example, hospitals managed by doctors perform better than those
managed by people with other backgrounds. And there are many examples of people
who ran one company effectively and had trouble transferring their skills to
the new organization.
Over the last year, I ve been working with a group at the University of Texas
thinking about what leadership education would look like for our students.
There is broad consensus across many schools that teach leadership education
about the core elements of what leaders need to know. These factors include:
The ability to motivate self and others, effective oral and written
communication, critical thinking skills, problem solving ability, and skills at
working with teams and delegating tasks.
On the surface, this seems like a nice list. Good leaders do have these
abilities and if you wanted to create future leaders, making sure they have
these skills is a good bet. They need to take in a large volume of information
and distill it into the essential elements that define the core problems to be
solved. They need to organize teams to solve these problems and to communicate
to a group why they should share a common vision. They need to establish trust
with a group and then use that trust to allow the team to accomplish more than
it could alone.
But these skills alone will not make a leader because, to actually excel at
this list of skills in practice, you also need a lot of expertise in a
particular domain.
As an example, take one of these skills: thinking critically in order to find
the essence of a situation. To do that well, you must have specific, technical
expertise. The critical information a doctor needs to diagnose a patient are
different from the knowledge used to understand a political standoff, and both
of those differ in important ways from what is needed to negotiate a good
business deal.
Even effective communication differs from one domain to another. Doctors
talking to patients must communicate information differently than politicians
reacting to a natural disaster or a CEO responding to a labor dispute.
When you begin to look at any of the core skills that leaders have, it quickly
becomes clear that domain-specific expertise is bound up in all of them. And
the domains of expertise required may also be fairly specific. Even business is
not really a single domain. Leadership in construction, semiconductor
fabrication, consulting, and retail sales all require a lot of specific
knowledge.
A common solution to this problem is for leaders to say that they will surround
themselves with good people who have the requisite expertise that will allow
them to make good decisions. The problem is that without actual expertise, how
do these leaders even know whether they have found the right people to give
them information? If managers cannot evaluate the information they are getting
for themselves, then they cannot lead effectively.
This way of thinking about leadership has two important implications. First,
when we teach people about leadership, we need to be more explicit that domain
expertise matters. Just because a person is successful at running one kind of
organization does not mean that they are likely to have the same degree of
success running an organization with a different mission. Second, when we train
people to take on leadership roles, we need to give them practice solving
domain-specific problems so that they can prepare to integrate information in
the arena in which they are being asked to lead. For example, it isn t enough
just to teach people about how to resolve generic conflicts between employees,
we should create scenarios derived from real cases so that people have to
grapple with all of the ambiguities that come from the conflicts that arise
within particular industries.
This issue is particularly important given the frequency with which people in
the modern workplace change jobs and even move across industries. This mobility
means that many younger employees may not gain significant expertise in the
industry in which they are currently working, which will make it harder for
them to be effective in leadership roles. Companies need to identify
prospective future leaders and encourage them to settle down in order to
develop the specific skills they need to lead.
Art Markman, PhD, is the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of
Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin and founding
director of the program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations. He has
written over 150 scholarly papers on topics including reasoning, decision
making, and motivation. He is the author of several books including Smart
Thinking, Smart Change, and Habits of Leadership.