How Do You Do... What They Tell You... You Gotta Do?

This is one of the biggest complaints that I have about the College/University Educational System in America especially in the area of BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION.

From the Harvard Business Review:
Our research also pointed to six leadership skills where practice was particularly important. These are not mysterious and certainly aren’t new. However, the leaders we talked with emphasized that these fundamental skills really matter. 

Aspiring leaders should focus on practicing these essential basics:

1. Shape a vision that is exciting and challenging for your team (or division/unit/organization).
2. Translate that vision into a clear strategy about what actions to take, and what not to do.
3. Recruit, develop, and reward a team of great people to carry out the strategy.
4. Focus on measurable results.
5. Foster innovation and learning to sustain your team (or organization) and grow new leaders.
6. Lead yourself — know yourself, improve yourself, and manage the appropriate balance in your own life.

SO...

first of all, these are not Harvard's ideas or suggestions but the suggestions from several already successful business executive...

second, "How to implement" must be assumed.

SO AGAIN...  we have this nice list from a prestigious educational organization and we return to work and decide that we are going to implement right away...

Note...  key words will be highlighted

NUMBER ONE:  Shape a vision that is exciting and challenging for your team. 

I know how to shape a vision because I looked it up on the internet.  VISION means:  the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom.

HOW TO WRITE A VISION STATEMENT

Tips for crafting your vision statement

1.      Project five to 10 years in the future.
2.      Dream big and focus on success.
3.      Use the present tense.
4.      Use clear, concise, jargon-free language.
5.      Infuse it with passion and make it inspiring.
6.      Align it with your business values and goals

Source:  www.businessnewsdaily.com

Now, I have a whole lot of other factors to consider first in order for me to become a good leader and have no idea how long all of this is going to take...  and, if I have the time...  patients...  and money to pay my workforce to keep working while I learn to become a leader to them and/or for them.

OF COURSE...  this has been exaggerated to make a point.   And, I attended GRADUATE SCHOOL for two years where I received an MBA from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC and while my professors gave me many pieces of valuable information and many tools, they never really told me how to implement any of those ideas and tools (although one cannot really implement a tool) other than VIA CASE STUDIES where we read about how others did it, and were either successful or not successful hoping that by OSMOSIS we would become enlightened.

WHAT WORKS FOR ONE DOES NOT ALWAYS WORK FOR ANOTHER...  I learned that concept before I took my first step into Graduate School.

A LEADER LEARNS through EXPERIENCE not through BOOKS...

A STRATEGIC PLAN for example, is easy to write by one person and can be done over a weekend.  It is slightly more difficult to write, if one has to work with half a dozen managers or so and could take several weeks.  It becomes quite a formidable task to complete in an aligned fashion when one includes the inputs from the supervisors and workers that report to those half a dozen managers and could take 6-9 months to complete, perhaps longer...  and, if by some wild chance a STRATEGIC PLAN is eventually completed...   it is damn near impossible to IMPLEMENT unless the entire day of several people is focused on making sure that everyone does what the STRATEGIC PLAN says that they are going to do...  OTHERWISE THE STRATEGIC PLAN WILL NEVER BECOME IMPLEMENTED 100 PERCENT...

But, the College/University textbook authors don't share that tidbit of knowledge with you...

If you have read this far...  then you should completely understand the title of this article.

Final Question:  Why do we think that a LEADER should always be OUT IN FRONT of the team?