Minding The Leadership Gap

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

"Mind the gap" is well-understood in the U.K. as a warning to not fall onto the subway ("tube") tracks. Here in the U.S., we think in terms of talent shortfalls, the gaps in analytic skills, the shortage of managers with robust enterprise understanding and/or sophisticated world views.

As an industry, we struggle with overcoming these gaps, with training and education that helps build a capable workforce, with funtional skills development, and with advanced education generally through Master's programs.

While we fall short in many areas, we fail miserably in the leadership arena, where we, imho, have the greatest needs.

No only do we fail, we, all too often, teach the hard-won, but, misleading, lessons of the last century. Worse, we teach the habits and behaviors of managers.

Look, the attributes of leaders are manifold, and often counter-intuitive. Most often the laundry list that leaders must master to truly authentically lead fly in the faces of paper-clip-counting managers. The guilty party(ies): academics who live in another time and another world; and book-writing successes of another age, who dispense bromides disgiused as wisdom.

The attributes of genune leaders petty much translate to some form of the Golden Rule, or its successor, the Platinum Rule.

It's not complicated. Treat people like human beings to get the most out of them for the enterprise; that set of behaviors defines leaders.