Paradigm Shifts and Changing Gears

Choosing to Lead or Manage

“The management methodologies that helped to ­develop ­organizations in the past are no longer adequate or fully ­sustainable. Achieving world-class success in an ever-changing business environment requires a new breed of leadership.”

Becoming a better manager is primarily about honing your craft—creating processes of communication, organization, and ­interaction that allow the people who work for you to be best ­utilized and best focused on achieving the company’s goals. ­Without good management, complex companies tend to become ­chaotic in ways that threaten their ability to meet objectives, ­deadlines, and ­desired results.

Good management brings a degree of order and consistency to critical business dimensions, such as quality, performance, and profitability. These skills need to be demonstrated consistently on a daily basis to achieve full potential as an effective manager.

Leadership is Who You Are

Leading is more about who you are: your personal characteristics and how those attributes are portrayed to your coworkers daily. It is about creating vision and strategy, motivating action and aligning people.

It has been said that people look for certain characteristics in ­someone before they will fully commit to that person as a leader. One could certainly develop the competency and awareness needed to become a better leader—one that people will follow. This, however, is more an internal growth process than the development of a craft.

Becoming a leader requires consistent self-reflection, a willingness to think, and then behave differently. It’s about first seeing yourself as a leader, and then behaving in ways that make others see you as a leader as well.

Leaders and managers are complementary and related. Leading is more about who you are as a person: people want leaders who feel “follow-able.” This translates into six attributes: Outward Thinking, ­Passionate, Courageous, Wise, Generous, and Trustworthy. Once again, these attributes must be demonstrated on a daily basis to achieve full potential as an effective leader.

If you think of managing and leading as being a Venn diagram, the circle of leading is roughly who you are, and the circle of management is again roughly how you operate. However, it is suggested the two circles overlap in four key areas:
Great leaders and great managers listen well. They are intrigued by the new ideas of others; they limit their “egocentric self-talk,” and they hold themselves accountable for moving the business objectives forward.

If you are able to utilize these common attributes and both hone your people management skills and develop yourself as a “follow-able” leader, you’ll become a key component in a cutting-edge approach to conducting strong, sustainable business. The combination of a robust manager and a robust leader is rare and valuable to every organization, and essential for optimal organizational efficiency.

Six Traits of a Good Manager

1. Who You Are: Being creative, intuitive, courageous, positive, ­thoughtful, empathetic, powerful, strategic, authentic, truthful, clear, concise, detail oriented, persistent, visionary, etc. These ways of ­BEING directly impact what you do and what you have as a result. Great ­managers “check the ego” at the door and are self-aware enough to distinguish who they are being as the “cause” of results.
2. Being Creative: Great managers love to implement new and creative ideas. They view growth and challenges as a part of the game. They view obstacles along the way as something to crack, and overcome. Not being a victim of circumstance, but rather creating it as a teacher, a challenge, and something fun to master.
3. Being Intuitive: High performance managers understand the power of intuition. The internal compass that guides you from the gut. While we don’t often think of this in our natural course of business, we use it all day long. Consciously using your intuition by checking in and asking for your “inner answers” can prove to be the most powerful decision-making tool you have.
4. Being Competent: Star managers know their product/service/­systems and are ever improving them. In these exponential times, it’s more about keeping on top of it and creating it than it is about knowing it. We can never know all there is to know, but we can certainly focus on keeping abreast of the issues, influencers, and advances.
5. Being Committed to the Vision: A visionary manager is ­committed to the success of the project and to the success of all the team ­members as they gain access to goals and results. S/he holds the vision for the collective team and moves the team closer to the end result on a daily basis. Being able to see and implement the vision “holistically” and balancing it with the daily details is key.
6. Being Light and Having Fun: A stellar manager doesn’t just produce outstanding results: s/he has fun in the process! Lightness doesn’t impede results, but rather helps to move the team forward. Lightness complements the seriousness of the task at hand as well as the resolve of the team, therefore, contributing to strong team results and retention.