Management Blog

The Dalai Lama Leadership Lessons

This week Tibet's exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama has announced a long-awaited plan to devolve his political responsibilities to an elected figure. He said "As early as the 1960s, I have repeatedly stressed that Tibetans need a leader, elected freely by the Tibetan people, to whom I can devolve power."  The formal process of stepping down will begin at a meeting of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile next Monday.

Clearly, whoever replaces the Dalai Lama faces many leadership challenges, as no other Tibetan comes close to matching his authority as a spiritual and political leader. However he said the move would be to the long-term benefit of Tibetans.

This reminds me of the phrase “The main role of a leader is to create more leaders.” Effective leaders are motivated by the wish to empower others. They want to bring out the best in others. This is where the purpose of delegation becomes empowerment as well as efficiency.

How can you empower others? Johann Wolfgang von Goethe explains, “…treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them become what they are capable of being.”

Perhaps the greatest ability of a leader is the skill to recognise capability in others and encourage it. How do you recognise your staff’s abilities? How do you encourage it?

One of the biggest issues facing organisations is leadership development. Can you be part of the solution? You might consider serving as a mentor by spending a little time each week with your staff. Set up an agenda of what you want to discuss and what you hope to accomplish in each meeting. Lay out a career plan with the people you mentor. Set up actions points to meet those goals.

 Developing others in this way is not about training someone in technical aspects. It’s about helping them find ways to become a great leader. When you focus on that result, everything else falls into place.

For more on leadership development visit the Call of the Wild website.

The Difference Between Leadership and Management

The Institute of Leadership and Management qualifications are popular with companies who wish to train their staff to recognised standards of excellence in leadership and management. The training courses are very work based, which means that what is learned can always be taken directly back to the work place and applied there. However, leadership and management is not the same thing. So, what exactly is the difference between leadership and management?

Put simply, a leader at the business level is one who leads, usually in a new direction. The inference is also that it is a successful direction and those led are by and large the better for it. A manager in executive management, by contrast, is someone who is in control and is directing a group of people according to rules, regulations, values and general principles that have been well established and accepted. The two disciplines are complementary to each other, in that both the leader and the manager is a person in control of a given group. However, while their roles generally differ to a large extent, they can overlap in places at times.

The general aim of the Institute of Leadership and Management is improving leadership and management in business. Higher level qualifications are designed to support those ready for the necessary training courses, and can improve management capability and help to create future leaders, thereby enhancing the careers of all those involved.

It would follow, therefore, that the training for the Institute of Leadership and Management qualification programmes needs to take into account the essential difference between leadership and management skills. It's the difference between empowering and being empowered; between a character based individual and a skills based one; the difference between removing performance barriers and staying within segmented areas of responsibility. Managers need leaders, and leadership needs management; the two are tied in a never-ending business waltz that works well when the balance is right.

It is only right that there is a qualification that links leadership and management. The two go hand in hand, and attempts to separate them will most likely cause more trouble than it is worth. Planning, organisation and coordination coupled with inspiration, innovation and motivation is already a winning combination. The leader's questions of what and why depend to a large degree on the manager's questions of how and when, and vice versa. The two sides of any coin should be different, but they still remain an indivisible part of the same object. And so it must be with the difference between leadership and management.

For more information on Call of the Wild's Institute of Leadership and Management qualifications visit our webiste.

Leadership And Story Telling With Call of the Wild

Babcock ILM Award in Leadership and Management Skills with  Call of the Wild. This is one of th cohorts in action this week.

For more information on our Institute of Leadership and Management qualifications visit our website

The Last Flight of the Space Shuttle Discovery - Leadership Lessons

This week the space shuttle Discovery docked with the International Space Station for the very last time. This heralds the end of an era… but how did it start?

Although the Space Race can trace its origins to the 1930s it was in 1961 that US President John F Kennedy presented his vision to a joint session of congress:

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

It was about a week after Russia had sent Gagarin into orbit that he sent a memo to Vice President Lyndon B Johnson, asking him to look into the state of America's space programme, and into programmes which could offer NASA the opportunity to catch up. Johnson replied that the United States needed to do much more to reach a position of leadership, concluding that a piloted moon landing was so far in the future it was likely that the United States could achieve it first.

This bold vision brought many changes, not least the technological advances that trickled into everyday life and the brand new perspective of seeing the Earth from the Moon for the first time – a fragile blue pearl in the blackness of space – which facilitated the environmental movement. There was also a progression from competition to collaboration – with the USA and Russia combining resources to create the International Space Station.

As a leader what is your bold vision for the future? How will you make it happen? What could be the side benefits of striving for your vision? How can you turn competition into collaboration for the benefit of all?

Dave Crisp, Coach & Facilitator, 2011

Call of the Wild at the ILM Innovations in Coaching Conference

This is Call of the Wild at the ILM Institute of Leadership and Management conference held in Newport, Wales, Uk on Monday 7th March. This is us prior to delivering our workshop on innovations in coaching.

For more information on our ILM Institute of Leadership and Management qualifications visit the Call of the Wild website.