From the Ask Tom mailbag:
Hello Sir,
I am doing M.B.A (Finance) in University of Wales, Newport. I need some advice. What are the different ways to improve Managerial Skills? Could you please narrate this topic. I am a very big favourite of this blog.
Thanking you, -Yatish Kumar
Response:
Yatish, this is a very serious question. And it’s not just how we improve Managerial Skills. How do we learn anything? We can sit in classrooms, we can review case studies, we can study theories. But how do we integrate that into our daily behavior that makes us more effective?
Henry Mintzberg, Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal is adamant about how managers learn. “MBA classrooms overemphasize the science of management while ignoring its art and denigrating its craft, leaving a distorted impression of its practice. This calls for another approach to management education, whereby practicing mangers learn from their own experience. We need to build the art and the craft back into management education, and into management itself.”
I first read Mintzberg more than a decade ago. He is likely the single most powerful influence on the way we structured Working Leadership Online. It’s not about case studies, it’s about you. It’s about you, working as a manager, in real life, struggling with limited resources, under the pressures of time, the recession, a toxic team member. It’s not Leadership. It’s Working Leadership.
Yatish, I am enrolling you in a Free Trial. And I am extending the same to the readers of Management Skills Blog. This is my Friends and Family program and the community is growing.
Our next Subject Area kicks off on March 15, Managing Time, Managing Yourself. Hope to see you online. -Tom Foster