"When entering a Business School, very few students have a clear idea of what Leadership actually is, but many have unanswered questions about it.  I joined the research project EDHEC Leadership Gallery to find out more about what it really means.

My main purpose was to determine what leadership is, and rub shoulders with leaders and managers.  Indeed, I hadn't had many opportunities to meet a leader until I joined this project. I was eager to get to know them, the way they think, the way they act and the way they do their jobs.

The first step of my participation was to meet top managers with a faculty member of the research team and then to confront the theories and dogmas from the leaders themselves. Reality sometimes matches the principles, and sometimes it does not so we had to come up with brand new elements of modelization. This is what intellectually thrilled me the most.

I learnt three different things from my participation in the EDHEC Leadership Gallery project.

The first one is that one cannot  teach Leadership. It is not a subject to be explained ex cathedra to the students in lecture halls. However, one can learn Leadership. To do so, one of the best solutions is to meet leaders. The interviews were a real opportunities to have a contact with them so as to benefit from their skills and experience to get a clearer idea about Leadership. A meeting always facilitates the managerial learning, while the teaching sometimes fails.

The second thing I learnt is that one can think about Leadership through an extremely diversified array of theories and concepts, be they from management, sociology, psychology, literature or even psychoanalysis. I always bear in mind that this reflexive culture of management is useful to me today, but will also prove to be useful tomorrow and all along my career as a manager.

The third one is that Leadership is work before all. Leaders are not heroes, leaders are are men and women who do their jobs, but who do so with passion.

This project has really opened my eyes and I am more motivated than ever to take on the role of manager. "

By Nicolas Deslandre,
Master in Management
2006-2007