The social need for the development of managerial and leadership skills among future teachers

This article aims at justifying the social need for future leadership and leadership skills, and describes the classification, tariffs, leadership, and methods of developing leadership and managerial skills in students. Foreign experiences were studied and partial examples were given.

Organizational capability at a management level in an organization is considered essential to improve competitiveness and ensure future growth.

Organizations taking a proactive and systematic approach to management and leadership development generally produce more leadership talent, and best- practice firms are characterized by the intensity and quality of their management and leadership development inter-venations. They do as much of the same as other firms but perform it with greater rigor and consistency.

Leadership and management development in organizations can take a number of forms. It may be organization driven and consist of a variety of formal interventions such as coaching, mentoring, formal programmers and feedback-intensive programmers. These activities are directed by organizations and are usually built around competency models (Garavan, Hogan and Cahir-O'Donnell, 2008). However, organizations are recognizing that they must also promote and rely on their managers and leaders to engage in self-directed leadership development (DeRue and Ashford). Furthermore, in difficult economic times, formal programmers are both expensive and time consuming.

Cunningham (1986), for example, identifies three different viewpoints on the relationship between leadership and management. The first position assumes that leadership is one competence among a range required for effective management. A second position, advocated by Bennis and Nanus, suggests that the two concepts are separate but related, whereas a third position sees both concepts to be partially overlapping. There is evidence amongst academics that there is a need to conceptually distinguish leadership from management, often at the expense of the latter. Management as an activity and concept is often viewed as a `second-class citizen', something that is very transactional in nature. Kotter (1988) has argued that leaders and managers are distinct in their roles and functions.

He considers management to be concerned with planning and organizing whereas leadership is concerned with creating, coping with change and helping organizations to adapt in turbulent times. Two other recent contributions have similarly emphasized that the two concepts are different. Boydell, Burgoyne and Pedler (2004) consider management to be about implementation, order, efficiency and effectiveness. They define leadership as concerned with future directions in times of uncertainty, and argue that management may be sufficient in times of stability but is insufficient when organizational conditions are characterized by complexity, unpredictability and rapid change.

It is increasingly recognized that all managers, including first-line supervisors, need at some level to be leaders and to understand the concept of leadership, albeit the higher the organizational level, the more complex leadership becomes and the more it is concerned with broader and long-term aims. In some organizations people may be senior professionals such as doctors or scientists but not defined as managers (at least in terms of the formal organizational hierarchy). It would be naive, however, not to think of them as leaders or potential leaders.

• Impact and influence: The intention to persuade, convince, influence or impress others in order to support their agenda, or the desire to have a specific impact or effect on others.

• Defectiveness/assertiveness: Intentions to ensure that subordinates comply with their wishes. Directive behavior has a theme or tone of `telling people what to do'. The tone ranges from firm and directive to demanding.

• Teamwork and cooperation: The genuine intention to work collaboratively with others as opposed to separately or competitively.

• Team leadership: The intention to take a role as leader of a team or other group. Although it implies a desire to lead others and so can be manifested in the form of formal authority and responsibility, effective team leadership also requires the leader to know when not to act authoritatively if they are to extract the best out of the team.

• Analytical thinking: The ability to understand a situation by breaking it apart into smaller pieces, or tracing the implications of a situation in a step-by-step causal way.

• Conceptual thinking: Understanding a situation or problem by putting the pieces together, seeing the large picture. This includes identifying patterns or connections between situations that are not obviously related, and identifying key or underlying issues in complex situations.

• Self-control: The ability to keep emotions under control and to restrain negative actions when tempted, when faced with opposition or hostility from others, or when working under conditions of stress.

• Flexibility: The ability to adapt to and work effectively with a variety of situations, individuals, or groups.

Competency modelling has become widespread. The models describe the particular competencies that are needed by individuals to effectively perform their work. Organizations like them because they provide a consistent framework for integrating human capital management systems and can help align employee actions with common strategic organizational goals, and facilitate performance improvement through a competency-based development process. Competency models are based on the idea that every position requires the job incumbent to possess certain competencies in order to perform at his or her highest level.

1. Kotter J.P. (1988) The Leadership Factor, Free Press, New York Lave J., Wenger E.C. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

2. Margerison C. (1991) Making Management Development Work, McGraw Hill, Maidenhead McCall, M.W. Jnr and Hollenbeck, GP (2007) Getting leader development right: competence not competencies, In The Practice of Leadership: Developing the next generation of leaders, ed J.A. Conger and R. Riggio, pp 87-106, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco

3. New G.E. (1996) Reflections: a three-tier model of organizational competencies, Journal of Managerial Psychology, 11 (8), pp 44-51

4. Nonaka I., Takeuchi H. (1995) The Knowledge-Creating Company, Oxford University Press, New York

5. Polanyi M. (1966) The Tacit Dimension, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London

6. Wenger E.C., McDermott R., Snyder W.M. (2002) Cultivating Communities of Practice, Harvard Business School Press, Boston

7. Wenger E.C., Snyder W.M. (2000) Communities of practice: the organizational frontier, Harvard Business Review, January-February, pp 13945

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