David Sims: Being a leader without the “Leadership” T-shirt – report

On 24-25 April 2013, Dr. David Sims, professor at the City University London – Cass Business School held a lecture and a series of seminars at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of the Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca .The event was organized by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium from Budapest and the GTK – Business Consulting Club from Cluj-Napoca. The main topic of the lecture was “Leadership in crises in a multinational”, while the seminars were entitled as “Learning to lead”.

The lecture was open for all participants, while on the seminars, beside GTK members, representatives of other special colleges and students from the Romanian and English line of study also participated.

As an introduction of the open lecture, Mr. Sims distinguished the between the meaning of leadership (as a noun) and leading (as a verb). He emphasized that “leading is not necessarily done by the person at the top, even if they wear the leadership T-shirt”. Also, if under the control of a company manager nothing is changing, it means that the person is cannot be considered a leader.

During the seminars, our guest lecturer brought up real life examples – from Jesus Christ to Steven Hawking – to exemplify the art of leading. One of the examples was the case of Winston Churchill, prime minister of Great Britain. He was a person with great charisma, but with little talent to lead. His wife, Clementine Hoziert, was the one who was actually leading from behind the scenes. Mr. Sims also mentioned how a person can embody the act of leading by paving the way to the future and thus contributing to the development of a company. The main takeaway of the seminar was summarized by the following quote: “Always perform to the level above the one you are at!” – Alistair Johnston.

We would like to grab this opportunity to express our gratitude to our invited lecturer for the exceptional courses he held during the two days of this event!