Leadership Tips for the New Manager

This is the fourth in a series of essays that addresses major topics in the field of management. I have based these essays on countless provocative lectures and irreverent discussions as a nutty professor of business administration.

There's a saying I like that goes "Be the person your dog thinks you are." I hope it's not copyrighted, because I have no idea where it came from. I heard it someplace and I assume it's in the public domain. But it's not just a cute and poster-worthy slogan. I find it wise and pithy, or what an eggheaded academic would call "parsimonious." It says a lot about the subject of leadership in a minimum number of words.

There's another saying that goes "leaders are born, not made." It summarizes what is perhaps the oldest "theory" about leadership. It suggests that leadership is an inherent characteristic, part of the "art" side of management, something you can't teach but that can only be brought out of a person through first-hand experience, honing what might have been learned while growing up or in a person's latent personality.

Well, if leadership can only be learned through experience and cannot be taught per se, why are the stores and libraries and websites full of books and articles on leadership, promoting the secrets of famous leaders from Attila the Hun to Zorba the Greek? (That's "a" to "z" in case you didn't notice.) Why are there countless training seminars and college courses that address the subject? Are we just fascinated in studying leadership in a descriptive sense, or is the point to learn about leadership in a prescriptive sense? In other words, can we come to know what leadership behaviors are, and copy those behaviors in the hope that we can become better leaders through practice?

After countless rigorous studies of leadership, the answer seems to be a resounding "yes and no." Leadership, as the focus of management research, has turned out to be one of the messiest areas of theory, considering all the time and effort put into it after so many years by so many well-meaning people.