MpS Pegasus

Should bosses be managers or leaders? Is there a difference? Can leaders be managers? Can managers be leaders? Whatever, it’s irrelevant. The debate’s a red herring. 
 
It was maybe relevant in industrial-age 20thcentury when the boss’s prerogative was simply to control workers either by inspiring (leading) or manipulating (managing) them; when leaders and top managers (executives) were the unquestioned priests of the church of Industrial Management. 

It’s time to break the spell. It served the industrial age well but it’s an albatross round the neck of business in the post industrial age: where rates of change are exponentially increasing and high-wage economies and maybe ecological survival depend on people being radically creative, passionately engaged, deeply committed and highly collaborative; where everyone’s a marketer because everyone in the organisation vitally affects the customers’ experience. 

This new world needs a fresh understanding of leadership that enables diverse personal strengths to flourish in rich, close, open collaboration; that enables each member to lead according to their strengths. 

We need a new understanding that charismatic leadership is just one of many forms of leadership: that, for instance, an introverted analyst can lead precision and attention to fine detail; an independent egotistical salesperson can captain sales effort; a systematic, reliable process improver can lead quality assurance.  

It’s time for the “leaders and drivers” to allow the rest to actively and vitally engage in leadership. Trouble is, everything in conventional experience tells us, leaders and led, that that’s courting disaster: inviting anarchy; presiding over descent from control into chaos. 

Yet conventional leaders and managers who deliberately learn to allow other forms of  leadership to flourish, experience almost miraculous results. The learning’s not easy. It feels risky: like managerial suicide. It’s counter intuitive. But with wise support and professional coaching it happens. Not overnight but typically over 2-3 years with early signs of success clearly evident in 12 months. 

This change isn’t something that leaders and managers do to others. It’s fundamentally what leaders and managers do to and amongst themselves. It’s about the systematic changes they make to their interpersonal behaviour and expectations. 

It’s about the changed responses that they receive in a spiral of change from mechanical co-operation to dynamic, interpersonal collaboration. It’s about organisation changing from “boxes and wires” structures to rich webs of interpersonal relationships between people with diverse talents and strengths and deeply shared purpose.   

This is the new key to competitive success in the 21st century. Are you up for it? 

Will you dismiss it as “crazy-idealistic” dreaming considering the sort of people you have to work with? OK. Carry on as usual. Maybe your market will stay locked in the 20th century. If it doesn’t, get ready to eat the dust from your competitors who make the change. 

Steve Barnett

In this age of uncertainty and exponential change, the ideal of the Complete Manager should seem bazaar, yet the industrial-age expectation that the manager should know, persists: shared by manager and managed. 

Once upon a time it made some sense. "Workers" were expected to do what managers told them to do. Managers had authority over workers and the evidence of that authority was that workers did what managers told them to do. So, logically, the manager had to know what to do or (he) lost (his) authority.

This model of management began to seriously falter with the knowledge explosion and globalisation that accompanied the exponential advances in ICT. It became ridiculous for managers to even pretend to know everything, though many did (pretend).

Managers caught in the spell of knowing can't admit not knowing for fear of losing their authority over their subordinates. This limits their ability to learn; their ability to openly involve others; to move beyond sham consultation to actually empower better equipped others to make decisions. 

This entrenched desire to be a Complete Manager is evident in the seeming bottomless market for management self-improvement books: how-to tool boxes with tools and mantras for everything.

To break that spell is crucial for transforming a business organisation for success in the uncertain global business ecology of the 21 century. It is crucial to experiment and find new modes of control & discretion and through that discover unimagined new energy, adaptability, satisfaction and productivity.

It doesn't happen overnight. But, with good professional coaching, it does happen. Achieving the transformation isn't a matter of getting and understanding new (magic) knowledge. It's about the slow, deliberate process of changing behaviour - of recovering from the interpersonal dysfunctionality (madness) of industrial-age organisation and communication; to discover Management "but not as we know it." (Dr Jim Malloy, Chief Medical Officer,  Starship Enterprise)

Steve Barnett