The latest MBA: Management By App

One of things I’ve discovered since I started blogging and tweeting is how much I enjoy reading what other people have to say for themselves.  One of the sites I regularly visit is Inc. - it’s guaranteed to provide something of interest and I frequently tweet links to their articles.

For me, the best kind of article is not one that I necessarily agree with, but one that gets me all fired up, sending me off to jot down notes for a potential blog post of my own.  And that’s exactly what happened when I read 5 Brilliant People Management Tools.  The title itself was enough to make me curious, despite my growing weariness of posts with numbers in the title.  The opening sentence was also promising: ‘the formative years of any company have more to do with whom you hire and how you manage them than just about any other factor’. 

But then what happened?  There followed a list of the latest web tools designed to help you manage ‘essential HR and people management tasks’.  If how you manage people is so essential to the success of a new enterprise, somehow reducing it to a series of tasks that can be handled by the odd app or two doesn’t feel like you’ve really grasped how important it actually is. 

Now, I’m as much of a sucker for an elegant bit of software as the next person, and given that the author of this article writes about technical trends, his perspective is hardly surprising.  The problem I have has nothing to do with the use of web tools to manage certain processes – it’s about reducing people management to a series of processes in the first place. 

Process is important (it can for example help ensure compliance to employment legislation) but it is not the be all and end all.  As I’ve suggested before in one of my management clichés series, downgrading management to the administration of company process, policy and procedure can stifle a manager’s ability to motivate, inspire and engage people.  In the formative stages of any new enterprise, it is a manager’s leadership skills that will have the biggest impact on the performance of their people, not their ability to master the latest people management app.

Tim Schuler is a coach, facilitator and business partner. He specialises in bringing out the very best in managers, whether it’s their first management role or something they’ve been doing for a while. More information is available from www.tschuler.co.uk

Unstoppable Leadership

I recently had a Twitter conversation that started like this:

JamesYatesUSD: What does being UNSTOPPABLE mean to you what does it allow you to do?

BetterMgr: Being unstoppable would allow me to do anything - is that a good thing? Definitely better than being unstartable though.

Being a persistent man, James went on to ask ‘what makes you unstoppable?’ and this sent my thoughts off into realms way beyond the possibilities of the odd tweet. 

In many ways I conform to the stereotype of the typical Brit, trained from an early age to be sceptical, with an inbuilt mechanism to keep excessive positive thinking in check.  The capacity to believe I could be unstoppable is just not part of my DNA, while voices in my head consistently warn me of the dangers of unbridled optimism.  So in order to explore what unstoppability might mean, and in particular what unstoppable leadership looks like, I need to put aside my natural tendency to regard such gung-ho concepts with suspicion, and temporarily silence my persistent inner naysayers.

Unstoppability seems to require three things: a compelling vision, the ability to take decisive action and the knack of remaining motivated in the face of set-backs.  Without a compelling vision, being unstoppable is not a particularly useful or desirable leadership quality.   A runaway train hurtles on regardless, causing havoc and crushing those that get in its way.  This kind of unstoppability in a leader often encourages people either to step back and wait for them to crash or run out of fuel (as they inevitably will) or to plan ways of derailing them.  A compelling shared vision on the other hand brings others on board and adds to the overall momentum.

The ability to weigh up available options and take decisive action is an important component of unstoppability.  While some people find that too many options, different perspectives or missing information leads to inertia, the unstoppable leader sifts through the contradictions and makes a decision anyway.  This is where a wise leader listens closely to their inner critical voices, or better still surrounds themselves with people who are not afraid of putting forward alternative views or pointing out the risks involved.  Being decisive is good, making informed decisions is better.  

The real test comes when obstacles start to present themselves.  The truly unstoppable leader remains motivated when things go wrong; they see challenges not problems, and find barriers energising not draining.  A certain amount of flexibility is essential, keeping the vision pure but recognising that there are various ways of achieving it. 

In answer to James’ original question therefore about what unstoppable means to me, I have to confess that it all depends what vocabulary my inner voices have chosen to use today.  On a bad day, it is synonymous with stubbornness, obstinacy, inflexibility and downright pig-headedness – qualities I have been taught to shun from an early age.   But then a little voice pipes up from somewhere to remind me that one person’s intransigence is another’s tenacity, determination and steadfastness, qualities that even the most dyed-in-the-wool Brit can embrace if not with passion (another alien concept) at least with a modicum of enthusiasm.

Tim Schuler is a coach, facilitator and business partner. He specialises in bringing out the very best in managers, whether it’s their first management role or something they’ve been doing for a while. More information is available from www.tschuler.co.uk

Save Us from Leadership Conformity!

It would seem ridiculous to argue that one style of leadership is superior to all others.  Different situations require different approaches, and most people accept that organisations actually benefit from diversity.   But just how different can someone be, or do we still have a very narrow perception of what it takes to be a leader?

Gender is one area where difference regularly gets debated, particularly the difference in working styles that men and women offer.   Certain traits are regularly identified as being masculine and others as feminine.  In a recent article, How to Negotiate like a Woman, Susannah Breslin claims ‘when it comes to work, I’m more like a man than a woman.  I’m aggressive, competitive, and cut-throat’.   There is however a well-argued case that being more participatory, non-hierarchical, flexible and group-oriented, qualities traditionally associated with women, is exactly what modern organisations need. 

Whenever there is an attempt to discuss an imbalance such as the predominance of men at the top of major organisations, there is a risk that appearing to argue the merits of those currently in the majority will attract condemnation.   The ever-readable Dan Rockwell identifies that while it seems OK to talk about Where Women Leaders are Better than Men, there is something uncomfortable if not inherently dangerous in discussing Where Men Leaders are Better than Women.

Other areas of leadership difference occasionally capture the imagination, such as the current discussion about the strengths that introverts offer.  Susan Cain for example makes a compelling case for the quiet and contemplative in her passionate TED talk.  This all certainly makes a change from the message most introverts have heard throughout their lives that if they want to get on, especially in leadership roles, they need to become more extrovert. 

It is encouraging that these debates raise important issues about the benefits of some forms of diversity, even if there is still a long way to go.  The problem however is that the focus is often on relatively simple differences such as male/female or extroversion/introversion.  More complex distinctions such as cultural difference are less widely discussed, presumably because they do not lend themselves quite as readily to simple generalisations. 

It is perhaps this tendency to generalise, to place things in neat simple categories, that limits our view of leadership.  The steady stream of articles, blogs and tweets listing the traits or behaviours shared by successful leaders only serves to encourage sameness rather than diversity.   The underlying message seems to be ‘develop these particular characteristics and you too can be successful’.  

While it may be interesting to know what certain leaders have in common, there is far less written that celebrates their individuality, except in the case of a handful of maverick entrepreneurs.  Within most organisations, being too different seriously limits an individual’s prospects.  If we really believe that diversity enriches an organisation, we need to develop a broader vision of leadership, embracing people who fail to conform to our existing and rather narrow models.

Tim Schuler is a coach, facilitator and business partner. He specialises in bringing out the very best in managers, whether it’s their first management role or something they’ve been doing for a while. More information is available from www.tschuler.co.uk

Empowerment – fool’s gold or the real thing?

Over the years, the term empowerment has become part of everyday management language.  It has all the hallmarks of a winning concept: by giving individuals greater control over decisions that affect their work, they feel more engaged and fulfilled, and at the same time productivity and quality improve.  What’s not to love?

On closer inspection however, there’s a faint whiff of snake oil about the whole thing, managers giving back what they took away in the first place.  While of course there are individuals who find problem-solving and decision-making difficult at the best of times, many have no problem with these at all.  So, what robbed people of their natural abilities, and instilled in them instead a sense of learned helplessness? 

Empowerment is not just about adding vitality to a flagging workforce, with the implication that it is the workforce that needs to be fixed.  There is something rather patronising about a manager acting as Lord or Lady Bountiful bestowing on their people the power to use their own judgement, provided they stay well within the clearly defined limits of their pay grade. 

As well as thinking about how to empower staff therefore, managers should be focusing on eliminating the ways in which the organisation actively disempowers them.  There is little point introducing empowerment measures unless these are accompanied by a thorough overhaul of the organisational structures, policies and procedures that prevent individuals from using their judgement.   Without a culture where trust is clearly demonstrated, risk is acceptable and blame avoided, empowerment is likely to become yet another idea that sounds good in theory but achieves little in practice.

Tim Schuler is a coach, facilitator and business partner. He specialises in bringing out the very best in managers, whether it’s their first management role or something they’ve been doing for a while. More information is available from www.tschuler.co.uk



Management clichés: management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things

Like most clichés, Peter Drucker’s much quoted distinction between management and leadership, has lost its original impact and to some extent meaning through repetition and being taken out of context.  In a recent interview in the New York Times, a successful entrepreneur and former senior executive at Dell, Microsoft and Apple described Drucker’s aphorism in a somewhat alarming way.  Admitting that he thought he was a lousy manager but a pretty good leader, he depicted management as ‘dotting the Is, crossing the Ts, giving reviews, doing all the HR stuff’, while leadership requires understanding of the broader context, which may lead to decisions contrary to company policy.  

This seems to be a rather impoverished view of what management is about, reducing it to little more than administering company policies and procedures.  Is that really what organisations expect and need from their managers?

Over the years, much has been written about the differences between leadership and management, resulting in a proliferation of conflicting opinions and models.  Leadership has perhaps become associated with high-status activities to do with strategy, change and innovation, while management is seen to be much more mundane, concerned with operational implementation issues.  While having a distinction may be useful in that it promotes greater understanding of the range of perspectives needed to run an organisation successfully, the problem arises when people try to separate leadership and management into distinct activities undertaken by completely different people.   

Management involves much more than just administering company policies; to use another of Drucker’s observations, “management’s concern and management’s responsibility are everything that affects the performance of the institution”.  In order to help the organisation achieve its strategic goals, managers must have an in-depth understanding of the broader context, and possess the ability to challenge existing ways of doing things.  So although management includes ‘doing all the HR stuff’, this is far from blindly following company policy and ensuring compliance.  It involves considerable leadership skill to motivate, inspire and engage people, which may occasionally mean using judgement to weigh up the risks involved in acting contrary to policy. 

So although it is clear that being a manager requires the use of leadership skills, can a leader be effective without management ability?  Some leaders may concentrate on creating and communicating the vision, while the interpretation and implementation of this, together with the day-to-day management of the organisation, is largely delegated to others.  The way these leaders manage their direct reports may be fundamentally intuitive rather than based on following set procedures.  This approach relies heavily on trust and respect for management, for without these there is a risk that the vision will never be realised and management will be forced into a Cinderella role, while leadership plays the Ugly Sister, full of self-importance and frankly rather ridiculous in its lack of understanding of the practicalities of life. 

Where effectiveness (doing the right things) and efficiency (doing things right) are both required for success, so are leadership and management, and in most cases, these cannot be divided into completely separate roles undertaken by separate people.   

Tim Schuler is a coach, facilitator and business partner. He specialises in bringing out the very best in managers, whether it’s their first management role or something they’ve been doing for a while. More information is available from www.tschuler.co.uk