Movie Used in My Management Skills Class

"Never let someone elses problem become yours" is what a company CEO told me once.

That sounds like typical pass-the-buck, take-no-responsibility, throw-your-subordinates-under-the-bus bureaucratese to me!

As a retired Army reserve components armor/cavalry officer (whose military career began as an Air Force fighter backseater), and whose civilian career was in the public school system, it still bewilders me how people use the terms "management" and "leadership" interchangeably. Management skills are only one subset of the leadership skills set. I've seen plenty of people (particularly in the public school administrative system) who took all the management courses in graduate school and had not one iota of leadership in their skills sets. I also saw more than I cared to in both branches of service I was in.

I knew something was wrong back in Air Force ROTC in the 1970s when the "leadership" block of instruction was based upon a civilian corporate management model with "productivity" being the goal, and the "products" being things like aircraft sortie launches, and having little or nothing to do with actual combat readiness. During my time as a blue-suiter, everyone threw around terms like "9-1 leader" and "1-9 leader", the former being someone who placed the mission above all else and didn't worry about the morale or welfare of his subordinates, and the latter being someone who took care of the morale and welfare as first priority and relied on that to motivate his subordinates to accomplish the mission. In that context, General Savage was spoken of as a 9-1 leader who broke down because he'd slowly moved toward becoming a 1-9 leader (as Colonel Davenport had been) over time.

It was a welcome relief when I switched uniforms and found out that in Army terms, "leadership style" was pretty much defined along a spectrum of how much you micromanaged your subordinates and how much you delegated authority to them, with the caveat that as a leader you can never "delegate" responsibility. Friends of mine who stayed in the Air Force reported that the Air Force saw a gradual shift, or at least an attempt to shift, to that leadership model in the mid-'80s.

I don't think leadership can be taught in a classroom. The full skills set needs to be developed through experience.

The best quote on the difference between management and leadership I've ever heard is attributed to an Air Force fighter pilot who at the time serving as an Air Liaison Officer/Forward Air Controller assigned to an Army infantry unit in Vietnam (whose name I've unfortunately never been able to learn): "The difference between management and leadership is that you can't manage a man to his own death!"

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