Leadership and Management

The principles of Leadership and Management Development are constantly evolving. The purpose of this short text is to help you think about :

            1. The difference between Leadership and Management
            2. How those concepts work in your organisation at the moment
            3. Where you’d like to develop these skills within your organisation.

We will also take a brief look at Situational Leadership in more detail.

Leadership vs Management

What’s the difference? Take a moment to think about that.

Management is the art of getting things done with and through others. It’s about organising the group to work effectively, efficiently and consistently. So if we’re climbing the mountain it’s about organising the route, the supplies, making sure everyone’s fit and well trained, knowing the conditions, understanding how long it will take.

Leadership is all about providing the overall vision of what is to be done and enrolling others in why it needs to happen. In other words, knowing which mountain to climb, why and getting people excited about the trip.

So Leadership without Management? This can result in great ideas either not being executed or being executed badly.

And Management without Leadership? Well, this gets lots of things done but who knows if the end result will be the one you’re looking for?

How does this work in your organisation?

If you’re looking to build a really high performing team, great management and inspirational leadership are both vital.

Think back to the best teams you’ve ever been a part of, whether that’s at work, on the sports field or in some other context. I’ll bet you can remember the leader(s), the organiser(s), how great it felt to be working together seamlessly to a common purpose. Ultimately the massive sense of satisfaction of achieving something great.

Depending on the size of your organisation you may have multiple layers of leaders and managers, or it might just be you and one or two others. The important thing is that you recognise the different roles and when to apply them.

Let’s start with you, the owner or MD of the business. From a leadership perspective, your most important role is to make sure everyone knows :

            1. Where you want to take the business
            2. How quickly
            3. In what way (your values and how you want the business to work)
            4. What’s in it for them

Obviously, you need to be crystal clear on all of these points for yourself before you can communicate them effectively to others (you’d be surprised ….).

For some of the businesses I work with, that’s it. They are the leaders of the business and their teams are made up of managers and do-ers. For smaller businesses this is a perfectly natural phase of growth and can be very effective.

For other people, as their businesses grow, it becomes more and more important that their direct reports can become effective leaders as well as managers. This is where great leaders can help their managers grow and develop and is an appropriate point to introduce the idea of Situational Leadership.

Situational Leadership

The ideas behind situational leadership was studied and developed by Kenneth Blanchard and Paul Hersey in the late 1960’s. Primarily it’s about flexing and adapting Leadership styles to the appropriate situation and individual.

This diagram illustrates the basics :

What we often find with growing companies is that owners and managers have become stuck in a certain style of how they lead their teams. We also find that people assume either competence or incompetence and rarely revise their views as others develop.

 

 

So if we take a couple of examples. (These are real examples from real businesses).

Example 1

You just employed a new sales person. They are an accomplished sales professional with a great track record and really impressed you at interview. After their first week they’re looking a little lost and after the first month the excitement that you (and they) felt is disappearing. What’s going on here?

In this instance, the employing business realised that the sales person knew a lot more about selling than anyone else in the business did. What they didn’t realise is that the new person was at a very low competence level when it came to the products, services and objectives of the business. In effect they were just told “go sell”. Imagine some of the questions that the sales person was asking themselves.

“sell what?” : “how much of it?” : “how? On price or on value?” : “what’s the objective here? Turnover? Margin? Volume?” : “what’s our uniqueness?” : “what are we really good at?” : “what are we not so good at?”

So, whilst this person’s competency level for the mechanics of selling and building relationships was high (and could be delegated), their knowledge of the company and it’s objectives was very low and needed to be explained (directed).

 

Example 2

A young and enthusiastic team member has just been trained on a particular business process and is now getting on with it. You let them carry on, maybe checking in occasionally for the first half day. It all seems to be working. At the end of the month, the results don’t look quite right when you review them and it’s obvious that something has gone wrong with the process. What’s the problem?

This is a great example of heading straight from the Low Competence quadrant to the (assumed) High Competence quadrant. Skipping stages in the development journey can put you right back at the beginning.

The other scenario around this can be when a leader lingers in one quadrant for too long and doesn’t challenge the other person to develop their competency level. This results in stagnation and often de-motivation for both.

 

And Next …. ?

So when you think about your organisation, what leadership characteristics are you using?

A great place to start is by making the objectives of the business and the way you want people to deliver them clear to everyone.

Once you’ve done that you can talk to people about how their part of the business lines up with those objectives and where improvements could be made. This includes your managers and also your do-ers (and these are often mixed).

Once you have a clear picture you can start developing how you lead and manage your teams to where you want them to be. This is the point where learning about your own style and how that could be flexed or developed to achieve different effects comes in.

There are some great books on Leadership and organisational development which you’ll find in the other resources area of this post.

In the meantime …

Remember that sense of massive satisfaction in achieving whatever it was you thought of back at the beginning of this text? How great would it be for all of your team throughout the whole of your business to feel that way? Yes, that does include you too by the way.

That’s the power of great leadership within any business.