As the main theme of this class is LILTDY, I reflected on a psychological theory my coach at Toin mentioned. He had coached me for six years, and at the same time, he was pursuing his degrees. Starting from a bachelor degree, he is now studying to become a doctor of psychology at Tsukuba University. One time after practice in my senior year at high school, the heads of the team had a meeting about how to improve the team, where I learned about the PM theory of leadership.
Apart from what happened during the meeting, I will focus on the PM theory because I think it is a relevant topic for this course. Here's a link below to briefly explain it.
Unfortunately, the website is in Japanese because the theory originated in Japan. I also did a search to find sources in English, but couldn't find any good description about it on abstracts of academic papers. Tough luck with google scholar. However, as I was researching, I found something very similar to the PM theory, which is in English. The link is below.
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_73.htm
The reader of this post can imagine from the links, the PM theory is about characterizing leaders into four groups-- PM, Pm, pM, and pm. P stands for performance, and M is for maintenance. Notice that the grouping is case sensitive, as the upper case means superiority. Personally, I think I am Pm because I usually focus on the performance of a community more than the maintenance. This theory is applied for self-analysis and improvement. We can learn our weakness from such theories and keep in mind of what kind of person we are, and how we should be. Of course PM is the ideal form of leadership, but not many people have this kind of character. How about you?
I think great leaders like Shackleton possess the aspects of both P and M. He maintained his expedition team's life and successfully returned to civilization. From what I've learned from my coach, I think this is a good reason why Shackleton is praised as a leader.
Hi Masa,
返信削除Good post, and I find this notion of PM theory to be very illuminating. Too bad there is not more about it in English but at least from you I can get the basic idea. I believe that one of Steven Covey's Seven Habits involves something similar, perhaps under the idea of "sharpening the saw." That is, sometime you have to stop and sharpen the saw in order to be more effective later.