Learning from the greats helps us save a lot of time and money; Learning from the greats requires many skills to discern between what is worth replicating and what is worth forgetting.
Business-wise, the administrative practice of Benchmarking; it has facilitated organizational development and has facilitated the practice of continuous improvement; Successful companies, pioneers in the world market, set the pace, set standards, open the way, lead change and facilitate practice; At the Management level exactly the same thing happens, those who go forward and have achieved success know where to walk and what risks to avoid; Following and listening to them helps us avoid unnecessary effort; And of course we can also learn from them what we do not want to be, when we pay attention to their weaknesses and the mistakes they make.
The management training and development process is a “Process” defined as “Series of activities that, taken together and sequentially, help us meet objectives”; In this sense, it is important to consider that without demeaning or belittling the academic training that we may have, there are some stages in management training and development that we cannot ignore; perhaps one of the most important is an understanding of different leadership styles; understanding and learning from them is very important to exercise managerial positions.
To understand and learn from the different styles of leadership, it is necessary to live close to them, share the practice and choose the one that best suits our personality, training and, above all, our aspirations.
For this, we must pay attention to the way of managing those who have gone before us in the positions we occupy; in all of them there are stories that we must listen to and understand, some are full of successes, others on the contrary are accompanied by failures or mistakes; In both cases, they are experiences that facilitate the management training and development process and that normally exceed the academy.
Leadership is inspirational, it must be our starting point in the management training and development process, considering the experiences of the leaders with whom we interact in our work or professional life, it is important to forge a style of our own that allows us to inspire our followers. This means guaranteeing success.
It is a common mistake for middle managers or managers in training (aspiring to top management positions) who often do not consider the previous experiences of their predecessors in managerial positions; sometimes they try to innovate and bring about change; however the results are not necessarily successful when the change is made in a radical way; This is one of the great failures of the practice of Reengineering.
Normally when assuming a higher hierarchy position, and very often, when it is the first time that we live the experience, we try to make changes, without knowing the reality or without taking into account the experiences of those who preceded us.
Once one of my best collaborators, when obtaining a promotion and occupying his first Managerial position, said to me, "I don't need tecomates to swim"
I found it an excellent attitude in someone who starts working and who shows a lot of potential and talent.
But it is not true, we all, without exception, need the support and guidance of someone else. We can probably swim without tecomates in the children's pool, maybe in the adult pool, probably in the Olympic pool, in the artificial wave pool and hopefully we dare to jump off the trampoline or down the slide, but for those who want swimming in the sea, where we cannot see the other shore, where its extension and the strength of its waves do not depend on our abilities or skills, surely we will need more than tecomates, perhaps floats, life jackets, vests and any accessory that it gives us security and that in a moment of crisis it helps us to float.
Some of us for not accepting our reality we just sat on the shore wetting our feet, others bravely threw ourselves into the water, we took a risk and after many chances of drowning we managed to get afloat.
" Wisdom is seeing life through the eyes of those who go forward " putting this into practice helps us not to make unnecessary mistakes and speeds up our learning process.
It is important that within our training and professional development process, we learn from the experiences of others, not to copy or imitate them, our goal should be to overcome them and make the most of them as a source of inspiration.
On another occasion, I heard an expert say, "I don't want my children to drown, but I do want them to swallow water, because it is the only way to learn to swim."
This reflection seemed very interesting and worth learning and applying; It is important that those of us who go forward concern ourselves with the formation of others, especially those in whom we see the potential to develop and whose responsibility in that development process is ours.
Development in a managerial position requires more than knowledge, experience, academia, attitude and common sense, it requires something more important, it requires humility. This must be the first competition that we must instill and train in our followers.
Our legacy must be founded on that humility, to teach, to accept and to respect that our followers must have their own and genuine leadership style, not without first sharing and transmitting our experiences and our stories of success and failure.
