If you ask most people who they work for they’ll name a company, but if you ask them why they love or hate it, stay or leave they’ll usually mention a manager, the people or the culture, which is a projection of the manager and the people.
People quitting is expensive and bad for team morale, but, as Phil pointed out, they can quit and not leave, which, from a management perspective, is the worst thing that can happen.
Think about it, who do you manage? And How?
Adequate managers manage employees.
Good managers manage people.
Great managers manage persons.
Yes, persons. Individuals, because you can’t manage (or lead) everyone the same way.
The same words often mean something different to different people, so you need to say what’s necessary in whatever words will ensure that each individual hears and understands your message.
I’m not saying that it’s easy, but you aren’t paid for easy—you’re paid for results.
And knowing how to manage persons is the best way to ensure that your people won’t quit.
Last Monday I laid out a do-it-yourself plan for mangers to juice growth among their people. Beth Miller asked why I didn’t include coaching; I responded that I believed that line managers needed to take responsibility for professional development, especially in the current economic climate.
Beth asked,“So what holds back managers from coaching?”
My response is what I want to focus on today.
“I think it’s partly language. I know a number of managers who have implemented what I described in the post, do a terrific job developing their people, but don’t consider any of it coaching or even mentoring. One even scoffs at “coaching,” yet he’s known for building his people.
In working with my MAP coaching I’ve found that what holds many managers back is terminology. If they relate to the descriptive terms there’s no problem, but if they don’t relate they can’t implement what they’ve learned. I change the language and bingo, they take off like a rocket.”
People are far more word-sensitive than most realize. They’re more aware of it in politics, religion and advertising, but less so in general business, even less when talking to their team and it’s almost non-existent when it comes to their own ‘hearing’.
The nice thing, as I said, is that it’s an easy fix once you notice. Noticing is easy, too. Just keep an eye out for a blank look when you’re talking. It’s that look of incomprehension that is the key to repeating, but in different words. There’s nothing that drives people nuts faster than having the same thing repeated over and over; if it wasn’t understood the first time repeating it or saying louder isn’t going to help.
And don’t start the change with ‘what I mean is…’, because many people will tune out at that point focusing on figuring out what you already said.
Instead, wait a bit (depending on context) and then present your thought from a different angle or change the phrasing of the thought that accompanied the blank look.
This isn’t about dumbing down what you say (or write); it’s about presenting it in a wholy different way; a way that the other person can hear.
The manager mentioned above detested the word ‘coach’ as some touch-feely new-age notion, nor was he enthralled with the term ‘mentor’.
To him, he was just doing what any manager worth a damn did—make sure that his people developed new skills and used the ones they had fully to the benefit of both the company and themselves.
As he once said to me, “developing people is part of a manager’s job, not something extra“—and his employer paid him to manage.
Gee, if I could bottle his MAP I could probably retire.
Did you know that you can’t lead if you’re a lousy manager? No matter how many leadership classes you take, books you read and seminars you attend if you don’t build good management skills you won’t lead anyone anywhere.
(By the same token, and I’ve said this many times, if you don’t practice so-called leadership skills you’ll have a tough time managing today’s workforce.)
Steve Wyrostek, in a guest post at Brilliant Leadership, has a list of actions so you can figure out if you’re a bad boss or a good one. He says “that a managerial jerk can never achieve good, sustainable results.”
True, although bad managers are known for bringing lots of fresh blood into their area—and then spilling it.
The trouble is that you can be a lousy manager without being terrible, a jerk or downright evil.
Call it lousy by benign neglect.
These are the ones who leave their people alone to find their own way with little guidance and less feedback.
Rather than manage they often focus on the big picture, providing their people with a detailed vision of what the future holds, but no operational map of how to get there, how far they’ve come or how far is left to go.
Leadership skills are important, but they can’t come at the expense of good management.
What does Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz have in common with incoming President Barack Obama?
While they are superb choices as managers and as leaders,
both are entering their respective stages at a time of crisis;
both have multiple and diverse constituencies;
both are the focus of extremely high, often conflicting, sometimes impossible expectations; and
both are subject to substantial outside influences, circumstances and pressure.
Hopefully both will succeed, but the real lesson to be learned here is in the list of commonality and what they do.
Not because of the obvious difficulties, the scope of challenges or even enormous pressures, but because these four points are what every person in charge faces—from multinational CEOs through small biz owners and managers at every level to parents. In many ways the scope isn’t even all that different, relatively speaking.
It’s like cooking. You can take a recipe for two, multiply by X and feed an army.
Which makes this the opportunity of a lifetime.
Look at your world, professional and personal, and analyze it based on the four points above and sort accordingly. Then watch the actions of these two role models.
For instance, Obama spent substantial time before the election and all his time since talking with a wide variety of people and gathering a diverse amount of information from all quarters—including just plain people—in order to be as fully briefed as possible to the situations he’ll inherit on January 20th.
Bartz plans to gather diverse intelligence from all stakeholders and doesn’t seem interested in just kowtowing to those with power.
“But for the moment, she doesn’t even seem to care [about a Microsoft deal]. She told journalists to stop already with the speculation and advice, and explained that she would take her time listening to employees and customers before making any big decisions.”
Ask yourself, how often do you take on a situation by doing instead of listening, analyzing and thinking first?
Plan on watching these two, learning from what they do and applying that knowledge to your own situations—kind of long-distance mentoring.
I had a recent conversation on the final post from a series last summer regarding supposed differences between ‘leaders’ and managers.
The reader said she was confused and asked whether managers needed to be ‘leaders’, too.
I think that my responses will be of use to others, so I’ve rounded them out below to increase access to the information.
It would be lovely if there was a nice, clear-cut answer to the ‘leader’/manager thing, but like a lot of these types of questions it depends on whom you ask.
There are two distinct schools of thought. One believes that leaders and managers are different and see ‘leaders’ as on a higher plane.
Others, like me, believe that to manage well requires having and using so-called leadership skills.
To further confuse the issue, there’s a growing movement that thinks leadership skills can and should be found at any/all levels of the organization (think organizational leadership) and become active as the need arises.
In other words, real leadership is what you believe and how you think and act, AKA, MAP, as opposed to your position.
Further, real leadership isn’t about style or even ‘vision’.
Style may change as you adopt a presentation appropriate to the people with whom you are interacting, but that stylistic change doesn’t change who you are and what you believe.
Vision presentation also changes based on your audience. Changes in the actual vision is a different subject
To summarize,
While management is what you do, leadership is the way you think.
Great management is composed of equal parts leadership and accountability.
True leaders are proclaimed as such by those around them, not by themselves.
The other day I said to a friend that I’ve turned into a real wimp. He thought I was kidding and said that I was the last person he associated with wimping out on anything.
I was surprised, but as we discussed it I realized that what I saw as wimpiness he saw as strength.
That got me to thinking how often what one person calls wimping out may be another person’s greatest act of courage. Likewise, what moves one person can leave another cold.
It’s all relative depending on your MAP, the circumstances and even the mood you’re in.
Sounds obvious, but it’s important knowledge, not information, but knowledge—maybe even wisdom—for any person responsible for motivating others, whether at work or in everyday life.
It’s not unusual for me to come up with what I think will be a great post and then find someone else thinking about the same thing.
Last Thursday I was sorting through ‘leadership’ articles and blog posts, once again disgusted with all the references to ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ that had little to do with leading and much to do with position.
Suddenly the proverbial light bulb went on and I realized that I could actually define my version of leadership without using the l-word (I hate words that are defined using variations of themselves). I decided to let the idea simmer for a couple of days and see if it still looked good Sunday.
Now that you’re primed, here’s my epiphany, feel free to shoot it down, tell me why and offer your own, but first some background.
On April 29 I wrote Leader/manager = leadager and followed it up with a seven-day series arguing that Warren Bennis’ statement “There is a profound difference between management and leadership…” doesn’t hold true with today’s modern workforce, i.e., great managers have to embrace Bennis’ leadership traits in order to motivate and retain their people.
Yet another management book, this one telling you that there are five major supports for great management
motivating others,
attracting and retaining top talent,
planning and organizing group performance,
driving results throughout an organization, and
lifelong development.
Which book doesn’t really matter and I’m not arguing with the list, but you’ve been told similar things over and over. While you really work at making them happen, your results are spotty and you’re not sure why.
Even when you follow the author’s how-to’s exactly your results leave you feeling less than satisfied.
What’s going on? Is there something wrong with you—or is it them?
More importantly, how do you fix it?
To paraphrase an old song, “The answer, my friend, is blowing in your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).” Right, in your MAP and not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because you are unique and books are written in a ‘one size fits all’ manner.
This doesn’t mean that you need to change your MAP (unless you decide that change would be beneficial), but it does mean that you need to find books, or parts of books, that resonate with your MAP. Doing so will supply you with tools you can really use and increase your satisfaction.
Here are three quick tests you can use when shopping for self-improvement books.
Read the Table of Contents – how someone organizes and presents their material needs to feel right to you or absorbing it moves to the difficult-if-ever category.
Scan some of the information and see if it makes sense to you – if you dip into the book in several places and each time find yourself scratching your head then it’s likely that the author and you are on a different wavelength. This doesn’t make either of you wrong, just different, and that kind of different makes your learning more difficult.
Read two or three paragraphs in at least three different places – evaluate whether the writing flows for you. No matter how good the content if the writing is so poor/dull/scholarly/etc. that you don’t enjoy it you won’t read it. And if you do manage to plow through it you’re unlikely to absorb it, which defeats the whole purpose of reading it.
Finally, being considered an expert doesn’t guarantee synergy with your MAP and it’s your MAP that needs to connect—not mine and not the reviewer’s.
How do you decide in which books to invest your time?
What are you favorite improvement books?
What’s all the fuss about leader as opposed to manager?
I keep wondering why there is so much discussion about “leader” vs. “manager.” The head of a company has to be a leader, because people need to follow someone or something in order to be productive and effective. Without a model to follow, people fall into chaos. That includes everyone from your children to heads of major corporations to the companies themselves.
Every person within a company also has to be a manager—from the top down. Without management of processes and outcomes, there is chaos.
So what’s the big deal?
The big deal is that we’ve been taught that you can
compartmentalize those two functions; and
you don’t have to be both to run a company.
Wrong! There have been so many books written on this subject that it is almost absurd to talk about it, but even my own research for my book, The Alpha Factor, which was focused upon how to create total dominance in the marketplace, had to recognize the importance of the leader/manager. The key is in understanding how and where to lead and what to manage. And aren’t those the key definers of leaders vs. managers?
I think that it’s the “how,” “where,” and “what” that make a total leader.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
If you ask most people who they work for they’ll name a company, but if you ask them why they love or hate it, stay or leave they’ll usually mention a manager, the people or the culture, which is a projection of the manager and the people.
My response is what I want to focus on today.
What does Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz have in common with incoming President Barack Obama?
It would be lovely if there was a nice, clear-cut answer to the ‘leader’/manager thing, but like a lot of these types of questions it depends on whom you ask.
Last Thursday I was sorting through ‘leadership’ articles and blog posts, once again disgusted with all the references to ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ that had little to do with leading and much to do with position.
For the next few months (longer I hope) Wes Ball, founder of 
