Management can’t be taught: Mintzberg

Term 'human resource' has depersonalized staff

Mintzberg on leadership: In January, the Strategic Capability Network (SCNetwork) hosted Henry Mintzberg at its monthly breakfast event in Toronto. Mintzberg, an internationally renowned author and professor of management studies at McGill University in Montreal, talked about management, leadership, MBAs and why he’s not a fan of the term “human resources.” SCNetwork provides a forum for business leaders to discuss leading-edge issues in HR management. For more information, visit www.scnetwork.ca.

Management can’t be taught: Mintzberg

Business, academia struggle to develop leaders

SCNetwork’s panel of thought leaders brings decades of experience from the senior ranks of Canada’s business community. Their commentary puts HR management issues into context and looks at the practical implications of proposals and policies.



Management can’t be taught: Mintzberg

By Shannon Klie

Graduates of traditional MBA programs should come with warning labels that say “not prepared to manage,” according to author and academic Henry Mintzberg.

MBAs provide a good business education, but not a management education, Mintzberg told a group of senior HR practitioners at a breakfast meeting in Toronto last month.

“I think the MBA is wonderful for learning about the business functions,” he said. “The MBA is fine as long as it’s recognized as developing analytical skills and is not mixed up with management or leadership.”

The emphasis on the science and figures of business make these programs very good at teaching marketing, finance and accounting, but they’re not very good at teaching management, he said.

“I think too often they create hubris,” he said.

Graduates come out of these programs, some at a young age with little or no actual business experience, and mistakenly think they can lead a company.

“You can’t create leaders in a classroom. You can enhance the qualities of people, who are natural managers and who know management, in a classroom,” he said.

Mintzberg runs the International Masters Program in Practicing Management (IMPPM) at McGill University in Montreal. The program is designed for senior managers, usually over 35 years of age and with more than 15 years of work experience.

In traditional management programs instructors drive participants toward a conclusion, but IMPPM instructors allow participants to reach their own conclusions, said Mintzberg.

“(Participants) learn how to be generalists by sharing their own experiences,” he said. “Half of the time we want people to learn from their own experiences, not just from us as faculty.”

Mintzberg runs another program, Advanced Leadership Program, where organizations send teams of five or six executives, who bring along an organizational problem, and then all teams work together, as “friendly consultants,” to solve the problem.

Managers versus leaders

Another issue facing organizations and leaders is the way the terms “management” and “leadership” keep evolving and changing, said Mintzberg. Now people are trying to differentiate managers from leaders, a distinction Mintzberg doesn’t like.

No one wants to be managed by someone who’s not a leader and if a leader’s not managing, he’s not tuned into the organization, he said.

Critics might say executives, an organization’s top leaders, shouldn’t be managing because no one likes a micro-manager, but the problem isn’t micro-managers, he said. It’s macro-managers — leaders who are too far removed from what’s actually happening in their own organizations. And when leaders don’t know what’s going on in their oganizations, it’s nearly impossible to do any kind of strategic planning, he said.

“We’re practicing a style of leadership that I think is dysfunctional,” said Mintzberg.

Too often top leaders are coming into an organization with the idea of “curing” an organization’s ills, without any proper understanding of what’s going on in the organization, said Mintzberg.

“Nursing is a much better model for managing than medicine. Medicine is about coming in, curing and leaving the mess to the nurses and nursing is about caring on a long-term basis to avoid problems,” said Mintzberg.

Human beings, not human resources

This kind of removed or “heroic” leadership and the depersonalizing term “human resources” explain in great part the rise of downsizing and outsourcing, according to Mintzberg.

“I’m not a fan of the term ‘human resources,’” he said. “I am not a ‘human resource,’ I’m a human being.”

The term “human resources” depersonalizes employees and makes them expendable, said Mintzberg. It has also led to the current view of organizations as a collection of departments, each independent of the other, with the mistaken belief that what happens in one department doesn’t affect the others, he said.

“We need to view organizations as communities and start to look at the effect of things like outsourcing and things like downsizing on those communities in the sense that the organization itself is a tightly knit community of people who care about what they’re doing,” he said. “We need to reframe our view of the organization from a collection of human resources to a community of human beings.”


About Mintzberg

Henry Mintzberg is a name business professionals should know. A professor at McGill University, he has published about 140 articles and 13 books and is a leading thinker on managerial work and strategy formation. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and of l’Ordre national du Quebec. He says: “I spend my public life dealing with organizations, and my private life escaping from them.” For more information visit www.henrymintzberg.com.

Return to the top of the page


Business, academia struggle to develop leaders

SCNetwork’s panel of thought leaders brings decades of experience from the senior ranks of Canada’s business community. Their commentary puts HR management issues into context and looks at the practical implications of proposals and policies.


Mintzberg: A rebel with a cause

By Matt Hemmingsen

More than 50 years ago, Jim Stark was the new kid in town — a young man with a troubled past. James Dean played the role in the 1955 film classic Rebel Without a Cause. At the SCNetwork’s breakfast session in January, Henry Mintzberg played a variation on the role. He too was new in town — an older and wiser version — dealing with the troubled past of academia and business in developing leadership talent.

Mintzberg’s opening salvo — “You can’t create leaders in a classroom” — sits contrary to the business school’s mantra that, through the case-study method, individuals gain the requisite skills and resources to become architects of strategy and renowned decision-makers. Given the proliferation of business schools, one could assume this perspective has won the day. Mintzberg argues otherwise, stating, “management is not a science, nor a profession. It is a practice, rooted in experience.”

From my perspective, the breadth and depth of one’s personal experience is the best teacher. Individuals learn from new challenges. They learn from their mistakes. They learn from others’ perspectives and feedback. Leadership maturity commences with the awareness of self and the awareness of others — by managing your own behaviour and by managing your relationship with others. Learning from your experiences and then applying those learnings to effective behaviour change is key to leadership development.

As employees start their careers with an organization, their value lies in the impact they make on the company results. Ascending the corporate ladder brings a more complex perspective on their contributions. Their value is now measured not only by the results they create but, as importantly, the way in which they manage key relationships to achieve these results — the ability to make it happen, to translate planning into action and to have that implemented and embedded by others in the organization. In simpler terms, according to Warren Bennis, an academic based out of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles who has devoted most of his life to the study of leaders, “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.”

Business schools do not appear to build this approach, nor incorporate this thinking into programs. They do a more than credible job of developing individuals to master the required analytical skills to find solutions and to make the hard decisions.

It is apparent there is little focus on the “human element” and the importance of interpersonal relationships in a complex business world. Business schools miss the basic principle that results are achieved through the efforts of people — not through financial analysis, not through market studies and not through mergers and acquisitions. It is the output of people in the respective disciplines that translates “vision into reality.” Research has shown time and again that organizational initiatives or programs fail due to a company’s unyielding focus on business issues at the expense of people-oriented needs.

So when and how will business schools change? It will be the rebels who make the difference — those who continue to challenge the status quo, bring new thinking and implement innovative approaches. Mintzberg is that rebel — delivering a fresh alternative to a leadership development model that has long since passed its “best-before date.”

Matt Hemmingsen is SCNetwork's lead commentator on strategic capability. He has held senior HR leadership roles in global corporations. He is a managing partner with Personal Strengths Canada, a member of an international company focused on improving business performance through relationship awareness. For more information, visit www.personalstrengths.ca or e-mail [email protected].

Return to the top of the page



A hard lesson to learn?

By Dave Crisp

Henry Mintzberg packed his January presentation on better ways to develop leaders with so many useful comments and humorous barbs aimed at traditional MBA and leadership development programs, it would be difficult to summarize them all even with his slides and the post-event reviews our SCNetwork members write for each other. Everyone had a favourite.

The overall message was clear: Listening and including diverse views makes for better leaders. Ironically, the most neglected voices in organizations are those of front-line staff and managers who have tremendous experience to share. No wonder they’re disengaged — no one is listening.

MBA programs worsen this situation by over-emphasizing analytics at the expense of excluding these people and their experienced judgment. Mintzberg isn’t suggesting metrics are useless, but rather we need to include human experience and judgment along with them.

This is a key diversity issue. We spend a lot of time talking about including Gen X and Y, older boomers, males and females and varied cultures, but very little time ensuring inclusion of all levels of management in meaningful discussions of strategy. Mintzberg joked employers would never willingly call people “bottom” management, but we imply it by using the terms upper and middle. Those words tell everyone who exactly is on the bottom and not consulted.

Too often all decisions are made by the very few at the top and communicated one way: Downward. Mintzberg wants to remedy this with all four programs he has developed.

This story may help. In one of those “you had to be there” moments I had a chance to chat with him while people at tables were working on a question. Mintzberg has implemented his programs in many different countries and I asked which posed significant cultural challenges. Japanese companies are most likely to feel his method is a bit too open-ended, he said.

That seemed odd because a number of the six or eight most successful companies he mentioned, ones that repeatedly send people to his programs, are global but have origins in Japan, such as Fujitsu. This may seem like a small point, but it’s significant. To succeed, companies must learn to be better at both analytics and the less tangible human judgment skills that people bring to leadership. The ones that do, gain the edge to become worldwide successes even if the skills weren’t natural to the home culture. Real strength comes from learning — and it takes a learning curve to excel at both analytics and listening to human judgment, not just one or the other.

Why is this inclusiveness such a hard lesson to learn?

Dave Crisp is SCNetwork's lead commentator on leadership in action. He shows clients how to improve results with better HR management and leadership. He has a wealth of experience, including 14 years leading HR at Hudson Bay Co., where he took the 70,000-employee retailer to “best company to work for” status. For more information, visit www.CrispStrategies.com.

Return to the top of the page


Abandon the search for the ‘white knight’

By Barry Barnes

What is management really? That’s the question Henry Mintzberg has been asking in one form or another for more than 30 years. And he has answered it in his approach to using managers’ experiences to help them become better managers through the International Masters Program in Practicing Management he leads at McGill University in Montreal. Not rejecting analysis and metrics as part of managing organizations, Mintzberg leads in firmly holding that managing, and consequently leadership, involves life experience, wisdom, thought and reflection.

The social sciences stress the importance of self-reflection in learning, yet management development programs — within both corporations and academia — are often too focused on action and results. Western society still looks for the white knight, that heroic leader who will solve problems. Practical experience, on the other hand, has shown that when a group rallies behind a cause an incredible amount of talent can be released and almost any situation or problem resolved.

Mintzberg has stepped beyond the traditional business-school approach to learning, perhaps back to the days when the study of organizations was in the realm of the sociologist. More than a century ago, it was recognized people interacted in multiple ways and there could be no single formula for dealing with them. Certainly there are often patterns resulting from cultural factors (and I posit that organizational structure is a kind of cultural structure) but there is no one answer to issues with groups of people. Nor is the answer at one moment in time necessarily the same as the one at a different moment.

The leadership literature makes it clear that servant leaders are more successful and leadership does not come just from the top.

It would be so easy to train high-quality managers if life were as simple as the case studies often used by business schools. It would be wonderful if we could take students and turn out managers. In reality the best we can do is turn out potential managers. The message is that it’s not about the numbers or the process — it’s about the people. We need to develop managers and leaders who can be sensitive to the needs of the various constituencies they serve. Good people management and good leadership are not mutually exclusive from good profits. But wisdom is a common factor, and wisdom takes time and experience to grow.

Mintzberg is a missionary who practices what he preaches, leveraging the experience of more mature managers to help each other reflect, learn and grow as they move through his programs. I hope that one day McGill University will accept his idea that more experienced, and hopefully wiser, managers should pay less for development programs since they are part of the teaching staff as much as they are learners.

Barry Barnes is SCNetwork's lead commentator on organizational effectiveness. He is executive vice-president of ESOP Builders, a firm that develops employee-share ownership plans for private Canadian enterprises. He is also president of the Crystalpines Group. He can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].

Return to the top of the page

To read the full story, login below.

Not a subscriber?

Start your subscription today!