Battered by the torrential economic fallout of recent years, many businesses are spending money on consultants and professional education seminars in their fight to maintain strong organizations and breed leaders who can guide the ship through the storm.
But these businesses may be wasting their much-needed money, according to a Roger Williams Law School professor who has a new book out on the subject of leadership in the business world. Businesses don’t need to send their workers and managers to another high-priced professional development seminar, he says. What they need costs less, but is much harder to find.
Most businesses need to completely rethink things and dramatically change their organizational cultures if they want to create the type of organizations that can thrive today, according to John C. Kunich, co-author of “Survival Kit for Leaders,” published earlier this month by Dallas-based Skyward Publishing.
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“It’s a very unforgiving environment these days. Profit margins are shrinking, and even huge companies like United Airlines are at risk of declaring bankruptcy. The traditional safeguards in business are largely gone … and you absolutely must get the utmost out of your leadership to be as innovative and visionary as possible. You can’t just rely on what used to work. Those days are gone, probably forever,” said Kunich.
“People throw a lot of money at the problem, they send their people to seminars, they buy books, they hire consultants and go to training, but the net result is no net change. Even if you have the money, it’s often much better spent. Save the high-priced psych-ups and quick fixes, sit people down together and work through practical problems in small groups. You can’t just sit people down in a room and talk at them for two hours and expect them to change their lives – it won’t work. It takes something from the listener as well. It has to be a two-way process.”
Businesses need to become flexible and more open to new ideas that challenge the way that things have always been done, said Kunich. They can do that by creating regular – even daily – informal discussions in which small groups of employees and managers can come together to talk in general about ways to do business and hash out specific problems faced by the organization.
Such a “case study” approach, used in business schools and law schools, is the best way to build strong organizations that communicate well and breed leaders who can provide an overarching vision for the future, said Kunich.
“Take real-life problems and treat them as case studies, and have somebody lead a discussion in small problem-solving groups,” Kunich said. “The case study method is very successful in business and law school, because people become interactive and engaged, not just sort of a couch potato. Quarterly retreats are good, but ideas come up all the time. Leadership has to allow people at all levels to come to management with their ideas. Creating that kind of an open environment is one of the hardest things to do, but it’s the only way to unleash the pent-up creativity that’s out there amongst almost all of the people who really do the work.”
The proliferation of professional education courses teaching management techniques in the business world have created an imbalance in organizations, favoring “managing” over “leading,” said Kunich. Too many organizations are preoccupied with belt-tightening and myopically focused on maintaining the status quo, and too many companies are throwing money at large, systemic problems by hiring consultants and sending employees to pre-packaged professional development seminars.
Current organizations don’t give enough attention to this distinction between leading and managing, argues Kunich in “Survival Kit for Leaders.” Although there are currently strong efforts to redress this imbalance between leadership and management, we have generally drifted too far toward management. This trend has been especially true in many training programs and practices, Kunich wrote.
“Management is a lot easier to teach, to measure and evaluate. People are interested in metrics, in performance evaluations. You can always keep track of productivity rates, the number of widgets you produce in an hour. But what’s really needed is to break out of the old paradigms. You can’t force somebody to have a paradigm shift, but you can at least create an environment where it might happen. And that’s not going to happen just sitting in a seminar,” said Kunich. “But what’s really needed is the ineffable quality of leadership, which is like holding a moonbeam in your hands. You can’t really quantify great leadership, but it’s important to try to come at the problem. There are things that work and point in the right direction.”
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