The Thoughtful Leader

Monthly Archives: January 2010

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Leaders Don’t Manage People, They Engage Them

Distinguishing leadership and management in organizations is critical for clear thinking about the roles, responsibilities and performance of people in positions of authority as well as those of the individuals who report to them. In our book Leading a Business in Anxious Times, Katharine Baker and I define leadership as “a relationship process among members of an organization that inspire them to take full advantage of opportunities, recognize and minimize threats to success, and avoid catastrophic failures” (page 19.) Framed as a relationship process, leadership is by definition reciprocal, and the outcomes are products of the relationships among people—the owners, executives, directors, managers, supervisors, employees, consultants, customers, vendors, etc. Thus the quality of the relationships in the workplace speaks to the quality of leadership.

Individuals who are responsible for accomplishing the work of the organization—the day to day operations, process improvements, implementing changes, etc. are often called managers. They usually decide policies, establish procedures, control allocation of resources, schedules, and evaluate performance against quality standards, and they are often responsible for hiring and firing of personnel. When outcomes are disappointing, you might hear them say, I really don’t like to “manage people”. In that context, I don’t see them as poor managers; rather I see them as poor leaders. I have a bias against the concept of any individual “managing other people” because it fosters one-directional thinking, without regard for the reciprocity of human behavior in social systems. All parties play a part in the product of their relationship. Thinking of business management as managing people keeps managers’ thinking other-focused rather than keeping it focused on their own behavior. The obvious point here is that individuals can change or manage their own behavior to create an environment where others have the opportunity to perform well, but they cannot change the behavior of others. That’s a by-product of high functioning leadership.

Leadership and management, as it is commonly understood in today’s organizations, are not mutually exclusive. Successful managers also provide leadership. They inspire people to perform and the most successful ones inspire exceptional performance—performance that results in successful outcomes for all stakeholders. However, leadership need not only come from managers or from others in positions of authority. Every employee in an organization can and often does provide leadership at different times around various challenges. Successful organizations develop a culture of leadership—with widespread recognition that the organization is a natural system of mutually interdependent individuals who are responsible for managing themselves in mature ways. Such organizations have leaders throughout that foster open discussion and collaboration, mutual respect, and decision making that is in the best interest of the whole organization.

Leslie Ann Fox, CEO, Care Communications, Inc. January 29, 2010

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Leading in a Time of Constant Change

Happy New Year to our readers, colleagues, friends, and families.  What Leslie and I wish for the world (and for your company, your community, your family and ours) is that systems-based leadership ideas will take off in 2010.  As we write in the introduction to Leading a Business in Anxious Times, the leadership principles we’ve introduced in the book “will enable you and your organization to successfully face the challenges that you encounter in an unknown but constantly changing future.  They will give you the resilience, stability, flexibility, and vision to prepare yourself effectively for whatever lies ahead.  Imagine if your company embraced responding to change as its strategic differentiator.  What could it not accomplish?” (p. 22)

At this point all we know about 2010 (we don’t even know if it will end up as “twenty ten” or “two thousand ten”), is that it will surely involve enormous change and demands for adaptation from all of us.  We will certainly be called upon to analyze, understand, and utilize new technologies, new products, and new ideas for defining and solving challenges at home, at work, and in the wider world.  As you know from reading our book (and probably from your own life), most people experience change and the demand to adapt as stressful.  When we are feeling anxious or stressed out, we can’t think as clearly, we make mistakes, we look for shortcuts, and our productivity and performance go down.

Faced with the inevitability of change in 2010, what can we do about it?  We’ve said that functioning higher on the scale of differentiation (p.110) is the key to managing change and to providing effective leadership at all levels in a business.  And raising your functioning has to start with self-awareness:  “Understanding how you functioned in your family when you were growing up, what triggers your anxiety today, and how you react when you are anxious can inform your thinking in ways that enable you to better manage your anxiety in the present.  Functioning at a higher level of differentiation as a member of an organization is always beneficial; you are less vulnerable to absorbing anxiety from others in the emotional system.  Being a non-anxious presence in the system brings big benefits to the organization…  As a way of leading, differentiation of self is about the value that a thoughtful, self-reflecting, emotionally independent individual brings to the workplace (p. 124).”

Please read on through Chapter 5 to learn more about how to do this.  And write to us about how it works for you as you face the changes that 2010 will surely thrust upon you.

Katharine Gratwick Baker, PhD, Northampton, MA, December 31, 2009.