Take the Right Journey Toward Managerial Leadership

“I have two disturbing pieces of information for you,” said Dean George Packer Barry, of Yale’s School of Medicine, to a graduating class in 1939. “Half of what we taught you is not true. However, the most disconcerting piece is that we don’t know which half it is.”

I spent a considerable part of my professional career trying to find out about that other half. Over time the answer came to me, but it took me years to believe; Relationships plus risk-taking yields uncommon results. Could the answer be that simple? Yes, but the journey is an entirely different story.

Most technical disciplines did not encourage working together. Even if we had the foresight to master that skill, venturing outside was rare because there was much to learn in our chosen areas of expertise. Yet, in most cases, solving those applied problems required a different kind of thinking from what we were accustomed to.

Over my governmental career, I saw many opportunities for managers to lead but did not do so. They had the knowledge, skills and ability, but they lacked one critical factor: talent. Even if they did have the talent to lead, they passed. Instead, the problem would be managed until it was the manager’s time to climb the next rung of perceived success. Why take the unnecessary risk of being wrong and falling down the career ladder? There would be opportunities to lead when it was safer to do so.

Complaints about the lack of leadership during discussions with like-minded colleagues were frequent. They attended those expensive and certificate framing courses on leadership only to let the experience sit on the shelf somewhere. The behavior didn’t change, but they kept living the illusion of success because of the seat they occupied and their accoutrements on the wall.

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