After much encouragement, we are going to begin the Institute for Generative Leadership (IGL) blog in earnest. I will be a regular voice in the conversation, along with the members of IGL coaching team, and other guest “speakers.”
What do we have to say? And, why is it relevant?
Our work together over the last decades has been to demystify effective management, leadership, organizational and team performance, and living a good life. We’ve been quite successful in making these areas ones that are understandable, observable, and actionable, and can enable development of powerful skills and results in people’s lives. Our program participants are satisfied and an example of generative leadership, and we will be sharing their stories in future posts.
The mainstream understanding of management is thought to be captured in the MBA education, and it does represent the mainstream understanding. But that understanding doesn’t work, and the customers of MBA programs – the hiring CEO’s – as well as a number of business school professors, point out that the current design of MBA learning doesn’t produce management or leadership competence. In fact, dozens of studies have shown that an MBA degree does not produce a measurable difference in career advancement or salary increases over those who do not have MBA degrees (The End of Business Schools, Less Success Than Meets the Eye, Jeffrey Pfeffer, and Christina Fong (http://www.aomonline.org/Publications/Articles/BSchools.asp).
We’ll review these critiques, but more importantly, offer our work of over 30 years that we have evidence does produce measurable management and leadership skills and impact. I taught in a business school, Presidio School of Management for three years, and offer our work as a new contributing frame for curriculum design in business schools to address the failings of the current approaches. We think what we offer is an important currently missing piece for how we develop leaders, and the world is calling for a new level of leadership to deal with challenges that have never been faced before – global interdependency, global warming, environmental degradation, global financial instability, and perhaps more important and fundamental to these other issues, a shift in the kinds of human beings we are becoming in our media-rich world.
We also offer the Generative Leadership Program (GLP), which is focused on the development of embodied leadership and management skills that produce a measurable impact. Since 1998, we have been engaged with leaders and managers seeking to take their leadership impact to the next level, based on development and application in organizations of our approaches since 1981. We have found that our discipline produces the biggest impact and outcomes for the leaders and managers that are already successful.
If you are interested in a new approach to leadership that is based on leadership results, join our conversation. We will share our experience, our results, our perspectives, and the advances that are being made in making leadership and management grounded disciplines that enhance our ability as individuals and organizations to clarify what we care about, and take care of what we care about.