3. Cultivate Leadership, Not Management, and Know the Difference!
I’m not one for didactic, nonnegotiable statements of fact, but I’m going to risk one here. The reason? The science of management is quite well known, and the difference between managers and leaders is clear. So here goes: Managers direct and control; they deploy, coordinate, delegate, and manipulate resources. But managers are not necessarily leaders. Whereas managers administrate, leaders have the power to influence, to motivate, even inspire, and those are distinctly different traits. Indeed, true leadership is the ability to display attributes that make people want to follow.
Whereas managers can be provincial, selective, even guarded, leaders are inclusive, passionate, and express an expansive vision. Whereas managers push people forward, true leaders take action and look over their shoulders to find legions following them and emulating their action. In fact, true leaders somehow naturally, and without fanfare or plan, behave as a role model and allow their behavior to be modeled by peers, subordinates, and employees. If leaders are open, authentic, communicative, and supportive without being paternal, that spirit can more easily pervade the entire enterprise and can even make great leaders out of great managers. Let’s take a closer look.
All too commonly, leadership is characterized by a “teachable point of view.” A leader has a perspective that he articulates, teaches, or proscribes; people who follow that leader absorb that point of view and apply it to a desired outcome. However, my own perspective is that leaders shouldn’t pigeonhole or limit themselves into the role of teacher. Instead, they should aim to provide a leadership style that engages rather than proscribes. A look at the history of management theory can give you some insights here.
The classic approach to defining management comes from the days of “scientific management,” and its lead theorist, Frederick Winslow Taylor. who died in 1915. Taylor was originally a mechanical engineer, and he tried to bring the lessons learned from mechanical efficiency into the world of industrial efficiency and the management of people. He is sometimes referred to as the “father of scientific management,” and he had four key principles, called Taylor’s Principles. Briefly, they are
1. Replace rule-of-thumb methods with methods based on a scientific study.
2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee.
3. Provide detailed instruction and supervision of each worker.
4. Let managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work; let workers perform the tasks.
Sound like a guy you’d like to have over for dinner? Well, I am sure he’d be an interesting guest, though maybe a little strict around the topic of table manners and which fork you should use first. Seriously, his point is that management should be focused on control and delegation. But my point is that this style of management doesn’t have anything to do with leading people or engaging employees. To truly engage people, you must have employees who think as owners. And these four Taylor Principles treat employees merely as pawns in a scheme whose action are to be measured and improved upon as though they were machines or robots. And it’s hard to get that illusive extra effort out of a robot. They do merely what they are programmed to do; they don’t stay late because they are passionate about their jobs.
Let’s focus a little more closely on what makes a good manager, and then look at how managers can grow into leaders.
The first thing that good managers need to understand is that any attempt to engage or any attempt to facilitate positive outcomes for an organization now requires management to act as an agent of developing and retaining talent. It’s not enough to just maximize the efficiency of employees in the Frederick Winslow Taylor model. The manager shouldn’t be a director and supervisor but instead serve as a primary resource for knowledge, services, and facilities that employees need to do what is asked and expected. Sounds easy, right? But we’re talking way beyond resources and budgets. A good manager should serve as a remover of impediments, a resource that offers a broad perspective and institutional knowledge in service to help employees do their jobs.
Are you with me, or are you too worried about the economic recovery? Because I am going to push this a little further and show how great managers become leaders. In the previous chapter, and elsewhere in this book, we focus on creating environments in which an employee’s preferred self can emerge. Well, good managers use their authority and autonomy in ways that allow their employees’ preferred selves to emerge and avoid the politics, process, bureaucracy, and circumstantial matters that traditionally get in the way of executing a plan.
As managers develop into leaders, they encourage when things are going well, consent to prudent risk taking, and—in the end—act like quarterbacks. A game plan is in place, which the leadership created, and the quarterback’s job is to communicate what each player is expected to do to achieve results. Then, the quarterback basically takes the objective, hands it off, and allows people to do their jobs. But to be fully effective, a quarterback must manage the huddle and get the team to believe in the game plan. That’s where leadership comes in. There are characteristics of manager-leaders that bring out the “players” engagement and calls forth their discretionary effort. Let’s look closer at those leadership characteristics.
To capture the hearts and minds of your employees as a leader, how do you behave? Well, first, leaders are passionate. They express the passion about the task at hand; they sell the worthiness of the task and its level of importance; they understand and communicate the greatness of winning; and they are fully engaged. Also, all good leaders have vision. They can envision the end result and express that vision in what they say and how they behave. They have high levels of energy for the work, which is infectious, and they motivate people who want to emulate the leader’s character. Leaders are inclusive, too. They know that every member on the team is a valued contributor, from the superstar engineer all the way down to the person who turns the last bolt on the finished product. They know that no employees should be observers of a process but engaged participants in it, and they make clear to the employees that each plays an essential role. To go back to the football analogy: A crisp pattern run by a tight end who was never supposed to get the ball in the first place will draw defenders away from the real ball carrier on that play and facilitate the game plan.
Leaders are also not just observers. They have dirty nails, knees, and elbows. They can’t be dispassionate and don’t mind jumping in to get a taste of what’s going on. When leaders serve as resources, they are not just being smart, though that never hurts. Instead, they are placing resources and responsibility in the hands of people along with some autonomy to execute. They share knowledge, but they also facilitate knowledge sharing, as they recognize that they don’t have all the answers. They use the wisdom of their experience and skill to add value to the organization’s processes, and they use their perspective to help each group take the blinders off, to focus externally, not myopically.
Another leadership characteristic is openness, and that requires active listening. Leaders recognize that they might not be the smartest person on campus, and that in most cases—and this is central—none of us is as smart as all of us. They are open to diverse points of view and alternative ways to complete tasks. That openness allows for bad news to be delivered quickly—in either direction, up or down the ladder—and for problems to be addressed and solved directly.
Leaders are also externally focused. They have the perspective to recognize that the organization is ultimately all about the customers and product excellence, whether the leader is managing a multifacility hospital complex, a 500-member software development team, or a startup with 10 employees. They see that the products or service created is not about “us,” per se, but about focusing outward in the competitive world of commerce.
Leaders require some measure of charisma. I don’t mean charm and personally. In fact, I don’t even think that leaders should have to know the names of everyone in the company. But one of the characteristics of leadership I previously alluded to is that the leader should practice behavior that can—and should—be emulated throughout the enterprise. If leaders knows just the names, aspirations, and concerns of the people around them, then those managers, in turn, are given a kind of subtle mandate and a behavior model to know the people they work with in the same way. In this manner, the behavior is passed down the line. If managers are gruff and dismissive, cold and impersonal, that’s the behavior model that will be emulated by their subordinates, and they will model that behavior along the command chain.
Leaders should cultivate a personal presence that people want to be around. That doesn’t mean that they should be standup comics, or saccharine sweet; they can’t be someone who gives out hugs while delivering coffee to everyone’s desk each morning. But leaders should smile more than they frown; leaders are empathetic in an adult way, rather than being sympathetic in a maternal or paternal way. In short, leaders care and show that they care. They create workplace environments in which employees can develop a sense of trust and caring.
Leaders must display courage and visibly show that courage at crucial times, as when—such as today—the economy forces some tough decisions. How is this expressed in a literal, practical way? It’s simple: For starters, leaders should talk about “the elephant in the room.” They should address problems directly through imperative, decisive, effective action. Good leaders don’t remain silent when they see something that’s wrong or misguided. Remember, your organization is going to emulate the leaders’ actions, and by demonstrating at the top that your organization is one that addresses and solves problems, this culture of problem solving becomes part of the organization’s culture. And it makes everyone feel invested in the organization, because they feel as though they can change it. In a recent book. Geography of Bliss, the author Eric Weiner points out that Switzerland is one of the happiest places on Earth. One of the reasons is that they vote as often as seven times a year. How does it make them happy? The average citizen is not locked out of the political process, and there is no sense that an elite class of people is making decisions. Average citizens can affect the process if they want to add their voice. So instead of low levels of enragement, there is a sense of engagement. The citizens are treated as owners. Now, think of that in terms of employees. Imagine how much rage/discontent/boredom can build up if the employees do not see themselves having a voice/input/sweat equity/intellectual capital in the results produced by the organization, if they don’t feel engaged or part of the organization’s processes. On the contrary, imagine how engaged employees feel if they “voted” in some way such as the Swiss, if they had some ownership in the direction and outcomes of their organization...even if that “say” were expressed not by binding votes, but just the knowledge and comfort, along with accountability, that exists in which the leaders encouraged, respected, and genuinely responded to “employee-constituents.”
As leaders ask the tough questions, talk about the “elephant in the room,” the obvious truths, and engage employees in discussions in a genuine open way, they are also free to engage in genuinely difficult discussions about performance, results, process, and workplace politics. In that case, this is a conversation with the employees and not a gripe session in which everyone boils over with frustration and resentment because the problems have gone on too far. With this approach, the appraisal of the organization can be handled in an adult, nonjudgmental manner. When there is open communication and issues are not buried or hidden, it’s a win-win for leadership and employees. There is no zero sum game in which everything that leadership grabs is kept away from employees and vice versa; in fact, the communication can be remarkably nonadversarial. And anything that is gained from either side is simultaneously a bounty for both, because there actually aren’t two sides. Everyone is an owner.
Does all of this sound like a tall task? Well, keep reading, because I am not yet done. I think you see that point, though. Leading is a demanding task, and though some people are born to the task and intuitively understand what I am describing in this chapter, these traits can be learned and perfected.
Because leaders act in such a way that their behavior can be emulated throughout the organization, leaders must also be accountable. When leaders are accountable, even at the highest level, it sends a message to their peers and subordinates that the leaders knows how to accept credit and absorb guilt. It also allows the leaders to disperse credit in an authentic manner, and hold peers and subordinates accountable, accordingly. So, by accepting responsibility and accountability, leaders gain points or credit, per se, to dispense worthy, authentic praise, and direct criticism and to distribute rewards and wealth.
Look at it this way, when a great coach loses a game, in the post-game press conference he usually says, “We played awfully.” He is applying blame; at the same time he allows the team to accept blame. That’s a culture of humility, accountability, and calm adult discourse, and if the coach is saying things like that publicly to the national press, you can bet he expects that same humility, accountability, and calm adult discourse among his players. They are, after all, owners of the victories—and the defeats.
Does mean these leaders must be soft? Hardly. When one of Vince Lombardi’s players was asked, “Does Vince play favorites?” The player answered. “No, he treats us all equally, like dogs.” Yet Lombardi was trusted for his consistency and for his ability to bestow praise and criticism with equal power and affect. And he had the respect of every player who played on his teams. He made people want to follow.