Introduction
Leadership skills, abilities are very important
to every leader. In this article I explore the studies, what the others say
about leadership can be developed through learning or practice? There are
different ways that the leaders to advance their leadership skills. Some of
them learn leadership skills from classroom or books, some of them develop the
skills by practicing in their daily life, some of them study and review their
past experiences. Whatever the way they develop the skills, the important is effectiveness
of their leadership quality in the field.
Two researchers from Canada and USA (Lillas M. Brown, Barry Z. Posner, 2001) investigated the
leaning Tactics Inventory and leadership practices Inventory. They investigated
how two important research streams, namely learning and leadership might be
related with one another. One is about how people learn and the other is about
how people lead. In this study they attempt to connect these ideas together.
Analyse data in relation to the topic
Data collection
for this research consists of total number 312 respondents included 114 (36%)
female was in three different sources. The first were mid-level managers from
large high-technology company enrolled in a university based management
development course. The second were working professionals, across a variety of
high-technology organizations engaged in evening MBA program. The third were a
cross–section managers enrolled in Executive MBA program. These respondents
completed both the learning tactics inventory and the leadership tactics
inventory. The results of
data illustrated each of the learning tactics as hypothesized, was
significantly correlated with each of the leadership practices. Below here are
the tables they produced in the report. This report includes 2 tables, but no
other graphs or charts.
Table-1 show
the correlation between learning tactics and leadership tactics. The strongest
correlations with leadership were with the learning tactics of thinking and
with accessing others were the weakest correlations.
Table-2 show
the mean scores of low and high group of learning tactics and leadership
practice. This table affords more detailed view of the previous findings.
Relations between respond’s frequent. The analysis gives strong support to the
argument that learning is subsequently related to leadership. Better learners,
those with high score, regardless of learning mode, consistently engaged in
leadership practices more frequent than did those in the low learning category.
In the argument
they stated that the leaders from highly technical companies, such as those
involved in the study, who are highly educated in traditional sense would have
well-developed “thinking” learning tactics and that they would be more
self-reliant, independent and not particularly keen to “access other people”
for help.
Conclusion
The leaders who
lead with learnt knowledge of leadership skills and the leaders who practice
without knowledge of leadership skills will have difference results. The
leaders, learning knowledge of leadership skills would be someone past
experience for many times and that results may happened repeatedly in the past history,
but leaders who practicing without proper leadership skills knowledge and do
just own thinking may not have previous results or past experience. Leadership
skills Learning and practicing are related with one another and one tactic may influence
more than the other. In this research results indicated more active and
versatile learners subsequently consider themselves more frequently involved
and engaged in leadership behavior. Finally my argument for my topic question “can
leadership be developed through learning or practice?” is that the leadership
skill learning can helps more to develop leadership quality than practicing
leadership skills also combined with both are more effective to develop leadership
skills.
Reference
Lillas M. Brown, Barry Z. Posner. (2001). Exploring
the relationship between learning and leadership. Leadership &
Organization Development Journal, 274-280.
