This is a great article on Inc.com on becoming a good leader and the learning process by Harvard professor Linda A. Hill. Professor Hill has been studying and teaching business leadership for nearly three decades, perhaps longer than many of her MBA students have even been alive. As the chair of Harvard Business School’s Leadership Initiative, Hill researches many entrepreneurial issues, including managing cross-organizational relationships, implementing global strategy, emerging markets, innovation, talent management, and leadership development. She is the author of Becoming a Manager: How New Managers Master the Challenges of Leadership, and Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader, now available for pre-order on Amazon.com in advance of its January 2011 release. Hill recently sat down with Inc. editors to discuss her latest work.
Below in an interview with Linda and everyone’s favorite question are leaders born or made?
What role does experience play in leadership? Are leaders born, or are they made?
What my research on Becoming a Manager really shows is that people learn how to do their jobs from experience. You don’t learn how to do it in school. As an academic, that’s kind of distressing. As soon as students arrive in the MBA classroom, we do tell them ‘we can not teach you how to lead, but you can teach yourself.’ Leaders are more made than born, despite what people think, but it really is a process of self-development. As a leader, you’re using yourself as an instrument to get things done in organizations.
So then how does one become a leader?
Learning how to lead or how to be a manager—it’s a process of learning and unlearning. You have to unlearn if you’re a really successful star producer, so you can create the space to learn how to do this other thing. It’s actually about a transformation of your professional identity. It’s a very deep kind of learning—a different mindset, a different set of values. How do you get satisfaction from work? Many people reported to me ‘I never knew a promotion would be so painful’ because of that unlearning process. It’s so much harder to assess your impact through others, so becoming a manager is not only about the acquisition of competencies, but really the acquisition of a new professional identity to be able to do the work you need to do when you’re working with other people, as opposed to doing the work yourself.
to read the entire article click here
