Charisma in Leaders is a Dangerous Thing.

Students of leadership theory know about traits-based approaches.  Traits are a basic attempt to address the question of what good leadership is.  I believe people tend to form a picture in their minds of good leaders by picking famous ones.  Famous leaders are usually charismatic.

So it is no surprise that most people think charisma is required for effective leadership.  I did an informal survey to check.  I asked 100 people (63 women and 37 men) to agree or disagree with this statement: “Charisma is required for effective leadership.”  The results:

Diversity training - it doesn't work.

Question from my Human Resources Management Course: Unlike many training programs designed to develop skills, diversity training focuses on attitude. Briefly describe one experience you have had with diversity training (1) assessing how effective the training was and (2) one recommendation for improvement. Be specific and support your response with an example.

“Diversity training doesn’t extinguish prejudice. It promotes it” (Bregman, 2012, para 15).  I have attended many diversity trainings.  They were all a waste of time, except they helped me identify which of my coworkers might be bigots.  The best lesson I ever learned on diversity was at a UC Santa Cruz graduation. The president delivered the commencement address.  He said something to the effect of focusing on differences is counterproductive.  We should focus on similarities: we put our pants on one leg at a time, we eat breakfast and brush our teeth, and we want a better life for our children.  Diversity highlights division, divisiveness, and creates a hypersensitivity and burden of political correctness. 

On Followership

We can agree that improving leadership will improve results; that is why it is important to study leadership.  “The flip side of leadership is followership.  It stands to reason that if leadership is important to performance, followership must have something to do with it too” (McCallum, 2013, para. 2).  Frankly leaders cannot lead without followers; they need each other.  But the comparative lack of study in this area points to the over emphasis of leadership I talked about in my first post.