The Knowledge versus Leadership Debate

Articles » Leadership

 

The technical knowledge versus leadership skills.

 

It is well acknowledged that leadership skills take a lifetime to learn depending on the environment you inhabit.  On the other hand, technical knowledge has a limited lifetime.  In the US, engineering graduates' knowledge becomes obsolete after two years.

 

When selecting people to fill leadership positions, it is vital to discover how far along the leadership learning path the applicants have progressed.  People who want to develop the leadership skills and recognise that it is a process not an event will always perform better than the person who believes they know everything and have become legends in their own mind.  These people have stopped learning so they are perfectly equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

 

The rate of change we are currently experiencing is not going to slow down, it is going to accelerate.  The survivors of change will not be the most intelligent, the best qualified, or the strongest.  The successful people of the future will be the ones who have the ability to master change.

 

However, the successful people may not be learners of technical knowledge, they will be learners of leadership skills.  In the future we are going to expect more and more from our people.  This means that we will require a greater percentage of each person's talent and ability.  To release this talent and ability we will need leaders not technicians.  As the workplace population diminishes, each person is proportionately more influential and has a greater effect on the output, quality and safety of each business organisation. 

 

Our leadership skills are going to have to improve to get the very best from these people.  We get our results from other people, we don't perform the tasks ourselves.  How many frequently do we see senior managers who cannot use their obsolete technical skills, instead all their time is consumed by leadership issues?

 

There is no reason to believe that the best technical people will be the best leaders.  In fact, if you look back we have appointed people because of their technical knowledge in the past and look how so many have failed.  Our prime responsibility to our people is to ensure that they are led by people with well developed leadership skills.

 

A person with plenty of theoretical knowledge and little experience or ability in leadership will have a profoundly negative effect on their staff.  A person with low technical knowledge and high leadership skills will get the better results through their people.  In an ideal world, the technical people should be the best leaders, however, this has not happened.  It is a far easier to acquire knowledge than develop skills.  In the real world, the problems which cause us the most difficulty are not technical problems but people problems.  This is because we are not trained in this skill.

Article by Peter L Mitchell