Transitioning From Manager To Leader
Managing and leading are not the same. Each requires different actions and, more importantly, different ways of thinking. In previous postings I have described the differences between managing and leading. In my most recent entry on this subject I described the differentiation John Kotter makes between those who manage and those who lead. Managers plan, organize, control, and preserve order. Leaders establish direction, align people with that direction, and inspire people to move in the desired direction. Leaders encourage change.
Change requires moving outside the familiar. This often involves breaking longstanding rules and expectations. Think of a time when you productively broke the rules. What prompted you to break the rules? What did the effort require of you? What are the lessons you learned that may be applied to leading? What are obstacles to breaking the rules? Pondering these questions can help you learn from your own experiences of initiating change. How can you bolster your courage and skills to lead change?
Leaders think in broader terms than managers. Managers focus on the more immediate goals and needs of the organization. Leaders need to take a wider and more long-term perspective. In the book Personal and Organizational Transformations Through Action Inquiry Dalmar Fisher, David Rooke, and Bill Torbert identify four territories of experience. If you want to transition to a lead role, it is important to consciously address each of these territories.
The first territory is intentionality. This encompasses consideration of purpose, vision, intuition, direction. The second territory is planning. This includes strategies, tactics, plans. The third territory involves action. Behaviors, skills, activities, deeds, and performance are the elements within this territory of experience. The final territory is outcomes, which includes results, events, consequences, effects, and assessments.
A leader first considers the big picture. What is the mission, purpose, or overall direction for the organization? What is the vision of what is trying to be created? What is the organization striving to intentionally bring into being? When the purpose is clear, planning may begin to determine appropriate strategies and tactics to achieve that purpose. The plan then needs to be implemented and the results assessed. But assessment is not to be limited to simply the outcomes. A more extensive evaluation is necessary using what Fisher, Rooke, and Torbert call triple-loop inquiry.
The first inquiry loop examines the skillfulness of the actions and behaviors that led to the results. Could the actions have been more skillful? If so, what can be done to become more skilled? The second inquiry loop focuses on assessing whether or not the original plans and strategies still make sense based on the results. Would a change in plans yield better results? The third loop in the inquiry process considers if the original intentions remain realistic in light of the outcomes. This three-stage inquiry process examines all four territories of experience to determine if adjustments are needed in the implementation of a change initiative.
To transition from managing to leading, focus on what leaders do—establish direction, align people with the direction, inspire people to act, and produce change. Also think like a leader. Consider the four territories of experience—intention, planning, action, and outcomes. Then learn like a leader by undertaking triple-loop inquiry to assess your actions, your plans, and your intentions. As you act and think as a leader, you will grow to be a leader.
posted by Mitchell Alegre at 1:05 PM
4 Comments:
Sorry to disagree with your premise that managers and leaders are different with the inference that managers can't be leaders.
Managing is a term that applies to the effective use of a resource such as money management or supply chain management or what-have-you. People are a resource and they must be managed like any other resource, but obviously the tools are different for each resource.
Leadership applies to people and denotes the sending of value standard messages to people which most of them then follow/use. Thus we say that they have been "led" in the direction of those standards. Leadership is one side of the coin called values, the other side being followership.
Leadership in the workplace consists of the value standards reflected in everything that an employee experiences because these standards are what employees follow by using them to perform their work. Most of what the employee experiences is the support or lack thereof provided by management - such as training, tools, parts, discipline, direction, material, procedures, rules, technical advice, documentation, information, planning, etc.
Leadership is not a process any manager can change. It happens inexorably every minute of every day because of the way people are. The only choice available to a manager is the standard (good, bad, mediocre or in between) which he/she transmits to employees.
Because of these characteristics, "followership" turns out to be a major force in managing peoople. Those managers who take advantage of it can become extremely effective at managing their human capital.
For example, let's look at the top-down command and control technique that is the most widely used method to manage people.
Top-down concentrates on producing goals, targets, visions, orders and other directives in order to control the workforce and thereby achieve organizational success. Concentrating on giving direction prevents these managers from doing much of anything else. Thus top-down treats employees like robots in the "shut up and listen, I know better than you" mode, and rarely if ever listens to them. By so doing this approach ignores every employee's basic need to be heard and to be respected. In addition, not listening to employees makes top management ignorant of what is really going on in the workplace thus making their directives misguided at best and irrelevant at worst.
In top-down, nobody listens to employee ideas, nobody values their opinions, and nobody gives them any recognition. The only way that the workforce can deal with managers who treat them in this way is to disengage and ignore their behavior. In the workplace this is seen as being sullen, uncommunicative, having a poor attitude, low morale and/or apathy.
(During my first 12 years of managing people, I used top-down and was never aware of how bad my leadership was. It was not until I started really listening to employees that I began to understand.)
In this way and others, top-down demeans and disrespects employees sending them very negative value standard messages. The standards reflected in this treatment "lead" employees to treat their work, their customers, each other and their bosses with the same level of disrespect they received. No one can become committed to company goals while being treated so poorly.
This is the road to very poor corporate performance as compared to the results that would be achieved using a better approach. Top-down managers are their own worst enemies because they “lead” employees to the very worst performance. (In “The Human Side of Enterprise”, author Douglas McGregor named this “Theory X” and named the other extreme “Theory Y”, but he did not provide how to achieve it.)
If you want your employees to produce very high performance and eagerly embrace necessary changes, swing to the other end of the spectrum thus leading toward the highest possible performance. To do this, first get rid of all traces of a top-down approach. Everyone wants to do a good job, but don't want to be ordered around like a robot.
Next, start treating employees with great respect and not like robots by listening to whatever they want to say when they want to say it and responding in a very respectful manner. Responding respectfully means resolving their complaints and suggestions and answering their questions to their satisfaction as well as yours, but most importantly theirs. It also means providing them more than enough opportunity to voice their complaints, suggestions and questions. Spend your time making your support reflect the very highest standards of all values by resolving their complaints and suggestions thus "leading" them to use the very highest standards.
And realize that the highest quality and most respectful "direction" is the very least since no one likes to take orders or really needs them except in emergency situations. Anyone routinely needing extensive orders should not be on your team.
This treatment leads employees to treat their work, their customers, each other and their bosses with great respect. Listening and responding respectfully also inspires them to unleash their full potential of creativity, innovation and productivity on their work giving them great pride in it and causes them to love to come to work.
You will be stunned as I was by the huge amount of creativity, innovation and productivity you have unleashed. To learn how I escaped top-down after using it for 12 years, read an Interview of me
Best regards, Ben
Author "Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed"
I apologize if I gave the impression that managers cannot be leaders. Someone with the title of "manager" can be a manager, a leader, or both. I do not consider managing and leading to be titles but roles, functions, or processes. It is often said that things or processes are managed and people are led. I understand you to be saying the same.
Your comments got me thinking that managers are always leading people. Managers, through their actions and interactions, either lead people to effective or ineffective performance.
I read your interview that you provided a link to. What I found particularly interesting are your comments about cultivating non-follwership. I haven't come across that concept before. I find it an intriguing one.
Michael,
In my experiences, converting people to being non-followers produced about 60% of the total gain from changing a poorly motivated group to being the best that they can be.
Followers spend a lot of time following, attempting to learn to what they should conform. If they become non-followers, that brainpower will be expended on their work and that is why the gain in productivity is so significant.
Best regards, Ben
Somewhat of a semantic point, but using situational leadership is always the approach required. Those that are "followers" typically don't need the attention as who you call your "non-followers." I can see why that would be a great ah-ha moment.
An interesting phenomena is the "hog feeding" mentality. Somewhat fringe, yes, but still an important group to address because they are so viral.
This post references that article by Blessing White that says that 19 percent of workers are "actively disengaged." A number that high is indicative of a non-leader manager.
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