apuntes de la sesión MBA Unican

1. pygmalion
liderazgo ECO
enero 2012, MBA, Unican, Santander
Click on the underlined words to get to the sources
https://www.facebook.com/pygmalion2
http://web.me.com/pygmalion4/Site_2/Blog/Blog.html
Thursday, January 19, 12

2. pygmalion
pygmalion
leadership
Today we looked at how we lead and how we are led. Leadership is a social
phenomenon and needs followers to exist. We looked at different styles and
discourses of leadership.
As regards leadership, we looked at Western’s 4 leadership discourses: from the
‘controller’ discourse in , therapist, charismatic and the more recent eco-leader
discourse. We also looked at the dangers of what Mendl described as the ‘Romance’ of
leadership, or attributing to much importance to the leader and not enough to the
context or the team around them.
And finally, we looked at what leadership really means, when we ‘do’ it and what makes
it different from management and command. To do this we looked at the ideas of Keith
Grint and the concept of critical, tame and wicked problems. Grint maintains that the
more complex a problem, when it is impossible to separate the problem from its
context (think ‘the Euro’, ‘global warming’) the less likely an ‘elegant’ solution exists,
and the greater the need for collaborative, negotiated, ‘clumsy’ solutions.
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http://web.me.com/pygmalion4/Site_2/Blog/Blog.html
Thursday, January 19, 12

3. Mary Douglas. In this way we started to develop empathetic responses to problems along the lines
of “How would a neo-liberal approach this problem? What would the military do? What would my pygmalion
pygmalion
grandparents do? Sadly, we agreed that too many of us are trapped in Fatalist Communities at work.
We saw that leadership is often ‘messy’
We also started to identify different ‘therapist discourse’leadership styles and you can find more
looking carefully at the ideas of Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis... Why careful? Well, there is a
lot of bad, bad science in the world of coaching, business and economics, and Goleman’s idea that
we can ‘mirror’ the behaviour of others or control our emotions for economic gain still sounds a
little ‘individualist’ to me. And because it is good to question what we are sold as answers.
Goleman and Boyatzis identify 6 leadership styles (commander and pace-setter as potentially
dissonant and toxic; visionary, coach, affiliative and democratic as examples of what Goleman
calls resonant leadership. You may want to work out for yourselves where they fit into
Western’s leadership discourses.
Finally we decided that there is more ‘art’ and ‘philosophy’ in leadership studies than science.
Personally, I believe that the debate today should revolve around ethics (not ‘doing’ social
responsibility a lo ‘Noos’ for financial gain, but because the present model of individual
financial gain is not working, and is, in fact, leaving an awful lot of people without work. You
may want to read historian Tony Judt’s ‘Ill fairs the land’ (Algo va mal, en spanish). It rocks.
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http://web.me.com/pygmalion4/Site_2/Blog/Blog.html
Thursday, January 19, 12

4. day 3 and 4
What we didn’t have pygmalion
pygmalion
time for... but you do
We talked about how culture and organisational context affect leaders.
we learnt how to see ourselves as a product of the social group around us and discovered the
multiple identities we possess (or which possess us). We are not the same person in a bar on
the latest trends in ‘collaborative leadership’ and how this affects the climate of organisations
and workplaces. We discovered that when we work as a group towards a clear objective we are
all a lot more creative than, say, Renzo Piano, and all we need is some old newspapers, tape and
straws. Which led us to the nature of work today and the skills we need. At this point we talked
about what works and what doesn’t. Spanish restataurants are a success story today, but why?
and more importantly how? With the help of business guru Gary Hamel we looked at companies
like Gore, Whole Foods Market and others to see how they had radically changed work culture to
improve climate (and results). Without forgetting that Hamel once praised Enron as the best
company ever!
And although unpleasant men still earn 20% more than the rest, we concluded that change in
the way we do things at work is necessary for all of us.
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http://web.me.com/pygmalion4/Site_2/Blog/Blog.html
Thursday, January 19, 12

5. for further reading
• Grint, K, (2005) ‘Problems, Problems, Problems: The Social Construction of
Leadership’, Human Relations, 58,11, 1467- 1494.
• Management challenges for the 21st Century - Peter Drucker
• Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis (2001) Primal Leadership
• The Great Reset - Richard Florida
• Collinson, D. (2005) Rethinking followership: A post-structuralist analysis of follower
identities
• Hickman, G. (2010) Leading Change in Multiple Contexts
• Western, S. (2008) Leadership: a critical text
• Douglas, M, (1966) Purity and Danger, Routledge.
• G. Hamel, (2007), The Future of Management, Harvard
• Knud Illeris et al, (2009) Contemporary Theories of Learning, Routledge.
• Michael Foley, (2010)The Age of Absurdity, Simon & Schuster
• Norcross et al Discredited Psychological Treatments and Tests: A Delphi Poll http://
www.omnibehavioralhealth.com/pdf/delphi_poll.pdf
Thursday, January 19, 12