Putting the Contradictions Back in into Management Education Russ Vince Professor of Leadership and Change School of Management, University of Bath
Why am I suggesting ‘putting the contradictions back into management education’? • It is our responsibility as management educators to help students engage with complexities and contradictions that are integral to organizations – not to offer the means to avoid them. • We have to give them more than overly rational, individually focused and excessively positive models of management thought and action. • We can utilise the emotions and relations present in the management classroom to understand contradictions that are integral to the relationship between behaviour and structure in organizations. • We have to help managers and leaders to comprehend ALL aspects of behaviour in organizations (not just the nice bits)… therefore: Two Questions: How can we help students to better understand?
Contradictions of Healthcare Leadership (developed from the Healthcare Leadership Model, NHS Leadership Academy, 2013, p. 5-13) Leadership Behaviour WHAT IS IT? WHAT IS IT NOT? Inspiring Shared Valuing a service ethos; curious about how to Turning a blind eye; using values to push a personal or ‘tribal’ agenda; improve services and patient care; behaving in a way hiding behind values to avoid doing your best; self-righteousness; Purpose that reflects the principles and values of the NHS misplaced tenacity; shying away from doing what you know is right Understanding the unique qualities and needs of a Leading with Care Making excuses for poor performance; avoiding responsibility for the team; providing a caring, safe environment to enable well-being of colleagues in your team; failing to understand the everyone to do their jobs effectively impact of your own emotions; taking responsibility away from others Communicating a compelling and credible vision of Sharing the Vision Saying one thing and doing another; talking about the vision but not the future that feels achievable and exciting. working to achieve it; being inconsistent in what you say; avoiding the difficult messages. Engaging the Team Involving individuals and demonstrating that their Building plans without consultation; autocratic leadership; failing to contributions and ideas are valued and important for value diversity; springing ideas on others without discussion delivering outcomes and continuous improvements to the service Holding to Account Agreeing clear performance goals and quality Setting unclear targets; tolerating mediocrity; making erratic and indicators; supporting individuals and teams to take changeable demands; giving unbalanced feedback; making excuses responsibility for results; providing balanced for poor or variable performance; reluctance to change feedback Building capability to enable people to meet future Developing Capability Focusing on development for short-term task accomplishment; challenges; using a range of experiences as a vehicle supporting only technical learning at the expense of other forms of for individual and organizational learning; acting as a growth and development; developing yourself mainly for your own role model for personal development benefit; developing only the ‘best’ people
What Leaders Do… • Leaders control and/or undermine the • Leaders help determine the meaning of events meaning of events for personal or political • Leaders build agreement around objectives and reasons • Leaders create conflicts around objectives and strategies strategies • Leaders build task commitment and optimism • Leaders get in the way of task commitment, their behaviour can foster cynicism and apathy • Leaders develop mutual trust and co-operation • Leaders are often not trusted or trusting • Leaders strengthen collective identity • Leaders weaken collective identity, they work • Leaders organize and co-ordinate activities and make decisions in isolation • Leaders are disorganized and they fragment • Leaders encourage and facilitate collective activities learning (i.e. shared experiences, the pooling of • Leaders discourage and avoid sharing (because knowledge and skills) sharing is not always to their advantage) • Leaders obtain the necessary resources and • Leaders can ’ t get hold of the resources they support want and complain about the lack • Leaders undermine and dis-empower people • Leaders develop and empower people • Leaders are dismissive of ethics and social • Leaders promote social justice and ethical justice and regularly abuse the authority of behaviour (rather than abusing the authority of their role. their role).
…and how can we help students to learn about contradictions? • Examples: • Undergraduate … Organizational Behaviour in a Generally Available Unit (GAU) • Postgraduate … Psychodynamic experiential learning in an MBA Leadership module • Doctoral … the emotional experience of being a PhD student as part of learning about qualitative analysis • Criticality, Responsibility and Citizenship in Management Education: • Citizenship is full of contradictions because we comply with and challenge within organizations at the same time. • We have to take responsibility for enabling students’ engagement with contradictions, not reinforce their (or our) willingness to avoid them. • Criticality involves unsettling prevailing ways of working and assumptions both about managing/ leading AND about learning/ education. • It is important for management students to feel their reflections on leading and managing as a prerequisite to learning from them.
Putting the Contradictions Back in into Management Education Russ Vince Professor of Leadership and Change School of Management, University of Bath
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