Business Mastery

You’ll find the key for establishing leadership skills in your self within this article. Enjoy the material. We have found that most people equate managing and leading. They often interchange the terms managing and leading. Of course, in order to be an effective manager you have to be a leader. However, the opposite is not a case. One of the essential skills of management is leading, but leading and managing are not the same.

Think being a leader and being a manager are exactly the same?

Interesting question, but it’s not asked very often because people believe they already know managing and leading are the same concept. “They are the same thing,” most people believe. Particularly in a business environment, people think of their managers as the leaders. If you happen to be a member of an accounting department, for example, your manager is also your leader. And, it’s true. Leaders are often the ones promoted into managers. Also true that high-performing individuals are the ones getting promotions into management jobs. Great performing workers are not always your best management candidate, but that’s another story.

Is it crucial you have leadership skills to be a manager?

It’s certainly true if the manager happens to be a poor leader it’s a quick path to failure. You can’t be an effective manager if you don’t have great leadership skills. Imagine a situation where there is some sort of problem or crises on the job. The normal reaction during a problem is to look towards the boss. It’s expected she will provide leadership in that situation. If the manager has poorly developed leading skills, you’ll find the probability of success of solving a problem go way down. In most cases the workers want to focus on their job and leave problem-solving to their managers. They want and expect their manager to be leaders in those situations.

In general, people gravitate towards leaders. The majority of people like the security and the knowledge of knowing that someone else is in charge. They like knowing that they have a leader that is looking after them. As a result, they will always look to authority.

Is it possible that you could be a leader and not be a manager?

Of all the questions we’ve asked in this article, this is perhaps the best one of the bunch. In a word, yes. Your goal should be to have more people willing and able to lead than just your managers. Whenever a manager falls short one of the other leaders can pick up the ball. If in above example, one of the other people on the team, provided they possessed the ability to lead, could have easily picked up the ball and solve the issue.

Certainly the leading skill is a vital component of management. We have learned that leading and management are different. You must have excellent leading capabilities in order to be a highly successful manager. You want to have as many leaders as you can even if they’re not your managers.

Generally, you always want to have a majority of your employees able to step up as leaders from time to time. As it turns out good leaders know when it’s the right time to step up.

We have developed a great new set of tools to help. Take a look at our subsidiary company.

As I frequently promote in my Leriot System, we must constantly assess the enter situation and do our best to make sense of it, make the appropriate adjustments and improve our outcomes.

The recent economic debacle in the U.S. and elsewhere coupled with the recent congressional results reminds me of the arguments I loved to have with my Economics professors at the University of Washington. They were teaching the simple notion of supply and demand and how government policies were used to provide various incentives and disincentives for the public good. I insisted government simply interfered with the natural order of things usually with awful results. I “knew” they were communists and I now know I was a libertarian at heart.

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I facilitated a two day planning retreat last Thursday and Friday for one of my core clients. About half way through the 2nd day, one of the executives stated “prior to working with you, we spent entirely too much time forming and storming and too little performing. Most of the rest looked at her in bewilderment. 

I knew she was referring to work done in the mid sixties by Bruce Tuckman. Bruce was developing a model for teamwork in which he maintained there were phases a team went though in order to grow, face obstacles and challenges, find solutions, create a plan and deliver.

He called it the Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing Model. A few years later he added two additional phases he called Adjourning and Transforming. Although it is a bit academic, it did form the basis more much work on team development.

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Delegating work, responsibility, and authority is difficult for someone running the company because it means letting others make decisions that involve spending “your money”.

However, at a minimum, you should delegate enough authority to get the work done, to allow your managers to take initiative, and to keep the operation moving.

“Let others take care of the details”

That, in a few words, is the meaning of delegating work and responsibility.

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Tom Peters called this sticking to your knitting. Jay Abraham tells us to maximize what you are already doing before trying something new.

I say focus on what you are now doing, get the fat out of all the processes and maximize productivity. Your organization has an enormous amount of energy being spent on a vast array of activities. Think of it this way. It is unlikely you have people sitting around all do doing nothing, waiting for the next big opportunity or crisis.

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