A queen bee is an amazing corporate leader but without MBA

A queen bee would sting only another queen bee. What is so much to read or understand from the above statement? Indeed a very important management message, the queen bees sends out to the corporate leaders and entrepreneurs in particular.

The queen bee is the boss of any bee hive. All other bees such as drones (male), soldiers and workers exist in the hive only because of and only to serve the queen bee. The queen alone can establish a hive and lay eggs. The social organization of bees is highly evolved & established, well disciplined and the division of labor is well defined and followed. A bee hive can be easily compared to a corporate in its function and hierarchy.

Look at the beauty and dignity of the queen bee’s behaviour and leadership quality. She is the ‘supreme’ of the hive. She has the ability to sting more than once whereas other bees can sting only once and then they die. But the queen bee never stings other bees and she, if at all stings, only other queen bee that tends to enter her hive. She fights only with equals and never fights with anyone and every one in-discriminatively.

The queen bee follows self discipline, dignity and decorum even in attacking someone in the hive. A queen’s role is to procreate and continue generation. She is well focused in her mission. Only when there is a threat to her mission, she become violent and stings. She recognizes a possible threat to her mission only from another queen bee and not from drones or soldiers or workers in the hive or from other hive.

The entrepreneurs and the corporate leaders must introspect and ask the question, do they also follow the same discipline of what the queen bee follows in nature. Many entrepreneurs and corporate leaders seriously engage in petty quarrels and petty affairs in the corporate and waste their time and energy. Trivial and diagonal events in the corporate only attract these leaders easily and hence they get busy with such things. Owners of many organizations do exhibit such leadership quality.

If they are mission or goal focused and are driven by the ambition and action plan, they would never find time or pleasure in wasting their time in petty affairs. Unfortunately, most corporate leaders yet to know, even the very definition of what the corporate leadership means.

The small queen bee in the bee hive may represent a very primitive biological form in nature when compared to the men in corporate but the leadership style of the queen bees are far more evolved than all the management principles of the corporate world.

The corporate leaders and the entrepreneurs must learn their management lessons from nature, both for the purpose of being mission centric visionaries and also as better administrators of the corporate.