Be a Leader-Manager
What is required now is for organisations to grow the skills of people in management positions into Leader-Managers.
Without good management organisations will become chaotic in ways that will threaten their very existence. Good management brings order and consistency to key operations within organisations which are vital for success. Leadership is about coping with change. Why it has become important is that the commercial world is now hyper competitive and volatile. Technology changes, globalisation, social changes, political instability, economic instability, regulatory changes, environmental pressures all combine to challenges businesses with ever increasing change.
Being able cope with major changes is more and more necessary to survive and be competitive.
Leadership skills can be acquired and improved. Obviously not everyone necessarily can be good at both leading and managing but anything can be learned and adopted with sufficient application and practice.
Organisations need to understand the fundamental differences between leadership and management and begin to develop people to provide both.
Management v Leadership
Cope with Complexity Adapt & cope with Change
Bring Order & Predictability
Planning & Budgetting Setting Direction
Organizing & Staffing Aligning People
Control & Solve Problems Empowerment
Motivation & Inspiration
Management and leadership both involve deciding what needs to be done, organising people to deliver the required tasks and ensuring that the work actually gets completed. Management and Leadership work is complementary but each goes about the tasks in different ways.
Planning and Budgetting versus Setting Direction
The aim of management is predictability and orderly results. Leadership’s function is to produce change. Setting the direction of that change is essential. There is no mystery about this work but it is more about using ideas than budgetting and planning. It requires the search for patterns and relationships to then ask the question “What should we now do differently ?” in response to the particular situation. Setting Direction doesn’t produce detailed plans but delivers Visions and the strategies for realizing them. The vision needs to describe a business,technology, or corporate culture in terms of what it should become over the long term and articulate a feasible way of achieving this goal. This isn’t magic but a tough sometimes exhausting process of gathering and analyzing information. People who articulate visions aren’t magicians but broad based strategic thinkers who are willing to take risks. Visions and strategies do not have to be brilliantly innovative – it is the particular combination of ideas or patterns that may be new e.g. that no one had put these simple ideas together and dedicated people to implementing them. What is crucial about a vision is not how original it is but how well it serves the interests of all stakeholders – customers, shareholders, investors, employees etc. and how easily it can be translated into a realistic set of measurable mass actions. Strategy without execution is hallucination after all !
Organising and Staffing versus Aligning People
Managers look for the right fit between people and jobs. This is essentially operational work to ensure plans are implemented precisely and efficiently. Leaders look for the right fit between people and the right vision. This is more of a communication function which involves getting people inside and outside an organisation first to believe in an alternative future – and then to take initiative based on that shared vision.
A feature of modern organisations is interdependence where no one has complete autonomy, where most employees are linked to many others by their work, technology, management systems and hierachy. These links and other phenomena within organisations such as “Groupthink” present challenges when organisations attempt to change. To people who are over-educated in management and under-educated in leadership, the idea of getting people moving in the same direction would appear to be an organisational problem. What the Leader-Manager needs to do is not organise people but align them.
Managers “organise” to create human systems that can implement plans as precisely and efficiently as possible. An organisation will typically choose a structure of jobs and reporting relationships, staff it with suitably qualified staff, provide training, communication plans for the workforce, define authority delegation structures. Economic incentives also need to be set up to accomplish the plan, as well as systems to monitor implementation and performance.
Aligning is different – it is more of a communication challenge than a design problem. Aligning invariably involves communicating to many more individuals than organising does. The target population can involve not only a manager’s subordinates but also bosses, peers,staff in other parts of the organisation, as well as suppliers, government officials and customers depending on the context of the vision. Anyone who can help implement the vision and strategies or who can block implementation is relevant.
Another big challenge in leadership efforts is credibility – getting people to believe the message. Do this by working with integrity, trustworthiness and consistency in words and deeds.
Aligning leads to empowerment in a way that organising rarely does.
When a clear sense of direction has been communicated throughout an organisation - lower level employees can initiate actions without fear of reprimand - as long as their behaviour is consistent with the vision.
Controlling Activities and Solving Problems versus Motivating,Empowering and Inspiring
Management strives to make it easy for people to complete work and routine tasks day after day. Since high energy is essential to overcoming the barriers to change,leaders attempt to touch people at their deepest levels- by stirring in them a sense of belonging, self esteem and excitement. The Leader-Manager needs to adopt a philosophy of lifelong learning for themselves and their teams and empower all their teams to enjoy and expand their responsibilities.
Motivation and inspiration energize people by satisfying basic needs for achievement, a sense of belonging,recognition,self-esteem, a feeling of control over one’s life and the ability to live up to one’s ideals. Such feelings touch people deeply and elicit a powerful response.
The more that change is operating in the business environment the more that leaders must motivate people to provide leadership as well. When this works, it tends to reproduce leadership across an entire organisation. This is highly valuable, because coping with change in any complex business demands initiatives from many many people. Nothing less will work.
References
John P. Kotter – What Leaders Really Do - Harvard Business Review May 1990
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to develop people to provide both.