Leaders Are Made, Not Born

by Seth Sinclair, Member
  

On the AOL Government web site, Sandi Edwards, the director of Corporate and Government Solutions for AMA Enterprise, Inc., recently posted an article that claimed that the new generation of Federal workers were lacking in the skills Government agencies will need to meet their customers’ needs in the 21^st century.  (Read it here.) 

Ms. Edwards’ post was based on a “Critical Skills Survey” conducted by the American Management Association (AMA) in 2010.  The survey looked at the skills both government and private industry needed in their emergency leaders, and concluded that most federal workforces simply don’t have enough young people with those skills “to do the job that an increasingly competitive and innovation-based environment demands”.

The skills AMA believes young leaders need to develop include:

• Critical thinking and problem solving-the ability to make decisions, solve problems, and take actions as appropriate;
• Effective communication-the ability to synthesize and transmit your ideas both in written and oral forms;
• Collaboration and team building-the ability to work effectively with others, including those from diverse groups and with opposing points of view;
• Creativity and innovation-the ability to see what's NOT there and make something happen.

According to Ms. Edwards, these skills are not taught in schools, and most of today’s young people don’t have them intuitively—leading to a crisis that has “severely handicapped government organizations in their efforts to increase productivity and meet budget constraints while still delivering on their mission.”

At SAG, we think the list of skills AMA has developed for new leaders is both useful and comprehensive, but we disagree with the notion that the failure of America’s school system to develop graduates with all of these skills—in and of itself—is a reason for significant concern.  Very few, if any, of today’s senior government leaders had all of these skills when they began their careers.

Instead, they learned on the job; by following the example and advice of mentors; by observing behaviors, both good and bad, of leaders with whom they came into contact; by listening carefully when their performance was evaluated at all stages of their career; and through a process of lifelong learning, including training specifically developed for them at every stage of their careers.

Schools have never been able to replicate the business or government environment very well: there was never a “golden age” in which young leaders emerged, full-blown, from academia, ready to shoulder the responsibilities of leadership.  Some skills are best learned on the job, in a real-world environment: others, like collaboration and team building, can only be taught once people have some understanding of why those skills are so important.

We’ve taught many Federal employees and leaders in our training programs, and we’ve seen the improvements in performance, across the board, leadership training provides.  Our instructor-led classroom training, hands-on exercises, and one-on-one coaching sessions have built cadres of competent and inspired leaders to execute organizational strategies at numerous federal agencies.

By exposing our students to best practices and theories in leadership and management, and by providing them with a structured framework to help them apply what they learn in real-world situations, we help them develop the skills they will need to assume the duties of a Federal government leader.  While some students, naturally, are better than others at developing these skills, all of our students benefit from our training.

We have never seen a leader whose skills are so “natural” that he or she needs no more instruction than they received in high school and college.  Instead, learning the skills AMA describes is a lifelong process, and good agencies make sufficient resources available to train their staffs throughout their careers.

Here, of course, is the problem.  As Federal agencies increasingly face budget constraints in today’s environment, will they reduce the amount of funding they set aside for leadership training?  As Ms. Edwards points out, today’s college graduates don’t have the leadership skills they require on graduation (nor, we maintain, did their predecessors).  If they are not given formal, structured training tailored to their level of development, they will never learn what they need to know to succeed in today’s fast-paced business world—or tomorrow’s. 

Training funds are not a luxury, to be slashed when the funding pipeline begins to dry up: instead, they are a necessity—one of the prime ways to enable any Federal agency or private company to “do more with less” and meet the challenges of budget reductions.  Bold, visionary leadership can go a long way towards overcoming fiscal shortfalls—but such leaders aren’t born, they’re taught.  We hope that as today’s leaders make decisions about their agency’s futures, they will spare training costs from the budget ax to the maximum extent possible.