Fiddling with high–quality business models and rocket science mathematics on splendidly built spreadsheets may prove useless if you don’t understand what it is that you do best: manage or lead.
If you do both you might end up becoming one of the 40% or more of new businesses that will fail in 2006.
Management is a bottom-line focus: How can I best accomplish certain things? Leadership deals with the top line: What are the things I want to accomplish?
Stephen Covey, business expert and author
What makes how you approach the topic of management and leadership so compelling is that you have to be honest with 'what it is that you do best'.
Simple as it may sound, it is the easiest way to avoid losing your dream, waking up and having to go and work for someone else.
At first it may be difficult contemplating which side of the fence you may be on or would like to be on, particularly if you’ve had years of working for someone else, living and creating their destiny whilst you were being paid for it.
If this has been the case, or for whatever other reason, take heed of the wise and simple words of Stephen R. Covey:
“Management is a bottom-line focus: How can I best accomplish certain things? Leadership deals with the top line: What are the things I want to accomplish?”
Therefore an important question you may ask as a leader or someone that thinks they may be taking the leadership route is:
“How do I accomplish the things I want, in an ever-increasingly complex and changing world?”
Ronald Heifetz, the director of the Leadership Education Project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in the States says:
“Leaders of the future need to have the stomach for conflict and uncertainty, among their people and within themselves. That’s why leaders of the future need to have an experimental mindset.
"Some decisions will work, some won’t. Some projects will pay off, some won’t. But every decision and every project will teach you and your organisation something about how the world is changing, and about how your company compares with its competition.”
This doesn’t mean that one should test every idea that comes to mind, but to pick what is fundamental and what isn’t and the impact that it will have on the overall organisation, today, tomorrow and in the future.
The leaders that don’t will find it difficult to steer their dream or goal in the right direction.
What is certain is that leaders of the future will need to have a clear mind in order to remain objective.
How? Ask yourself, how do presidents and prime ministers of different countries make their decisions? They have advisers, mentors, consultants, think-tanks and so on.
Now, I’m not saying to go out and hire the resources a government would, because you would really be closing your business sooner than you thought; however, align yourself with people that can guide you.
These people must be trustworthy and have a different perspective on trends, events and possible scenarios.
Aside from leadership is management. If you think you are great at managing, though find it tricky to distinguish from leadership, take time to think about Stephen Covey’s question: “How can I best accomplish certain things?”
“Most of the time discussions about management end up with debates around specific attributes the manager should have to be successful.
"In so doing comes confusion between management and leadership,” says Pierre Jules Zing-Tsala, the Managing Director of PJ & Associates, the London-based management consulting firm, with offices in Paris, Cameroon and Romania.
“It takes more than a set of skills and management works as a system made of four building blocks. These include: the position, the tools, personal attribute skills along with methodologies,” Zing-Tsala goes on to add.
The Four Building Blocks
The management position has complex and ever-changing responsibilities, the focus of which shifts to reflect the issues, trends and preoccupations of time.
This individual identifies and achieves organisational objectives through the deployment of appropriate resources and will have responsibilities in one or more of five key areas.
These include: managing activities, managing resources, managing information, managing people, and managing oneself.
Few jobs are entirely managerial, yet very few exist without any management responsibilities. Therefore the simplest way to distinguish a manager from a non-manager is to judge one’s capability to 'harness resources'. This is what separates the boys from the men and the girls from the women!
Personal attribute skills include strong people management, change management capabilities, customer awareness, strong capabilities in managing information and the organisations knowledge, ability to manage activities and resources and most importantly the ability to manage oneself.
“Knowing what your key strengths and attributes is an order qualifier in regards to managing oneself,” say’s Zing Tsala.
The three well-known methodologies – management by objectives, management by projects and management by exception – are important in the make up of the management system.
The same applies for tools such as strategic planning, balance score card, and dashboards. All these form an essential balance for managers as both methodologies and tools are the enablers in 'managing the bottom-line focus'.
The true value builders are companies that grow the top line and bottom line in line with one another. They select the people who know what they are best at doing and place them on the side of the fence in which they produce the best results.
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