The OGM Interactive Edition - Summer 2023 - Read Now!
View Past Issues“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.
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.
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