In response to the Personal Foundation - A Course in Conscious Leadership teleclass that starts next week, Cliff Jackson points us to an article by Paul Glenn (author of Leading Geeks) entitled "Developing the Managerial Mind".

I urge you to read the entire article, and here is the key point:

"If you want to grow new leaders, you need to focus first on developing the managerial mind rather than leadership skills. Good leaders need a combination of managerial maturity, business acumen, wisdom and ethics in order to know what to do with skills. They must be able to look at the world through a number of distinct lenses, synthesize the chaos of reality into a coherent image and then use leadership skills to move people to positive action.

Given a choice, I'd take a less skilled but more thoughtful leader over a highly trained but more limited thinker. A leader with a good mind and heart can usually overcome a deficit of skills, but an immature yet skilled manipulator will eventually self-destruct, taking his organization with him."