Business people having board meeting in office.Catherine Yeulet
This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University with Talking Management for The Globe and Mail. Today I am delighted to sit down with my colleague Henry Mintzberg to talk about peer coaching - one of the hot ideas in leadership development.
Henry, you have been involved with leadership for a couple of decades, what is your latest thinking?
HENRY MINTZBERG – To back off leadership and emphasis communityship. Of course I have been thinking about that for decades too, but the more I see what goes on the more I think leadership is important and communityship, or a sense of community, is more important. Leaders need to serve communities, communities don't need to serve leaders. We started with the IMPM - the International Masters in Practicing Management. The idea there was to bring in managers instead of having them doing cases on other people's experience they bring in their own experience and they sit at round tables and they spend half of their time sharing their experiences in light of what we do in the other half which is introduce all kinds of concepts. That kind of developed into a healthcare program, and then it developed into Coaching Ourselves, which was taking the same philosophy and embedding it straight into companies.
KARL MOORE – Henry, why is it that you enjoy peer coaching so much?
HENRY MINTZBERG – Because a lot of chief executives have become lone wolves, not just in the nature of the job but because there is a lot of narcissism or focus on single individuals or if it's not the chief executives themselves its the board or the stockmarket analysts who expect the CEO to do everything. Every healthy organization or company, government department, NGO, anything, every healthy origanization has a strong sense of community. I have said it many times, good organizations are not collections of human resources they are communities of human beings. That is why we have got to get past this obsession with leadership as if it is one individual who makes all the difference. Individuals who make all the difference are very often ones who have a very sophisticated sense of community and they are building that and helping and taking advantage of the community that is there instead of ignoring it or, in so many cases, destroying it.