By Thomas J. Lee
In one way or another, I've been working in the vineyards of leadership for most of my career. I have interviewed senators and presidents. I have worked with CEOs of big companies. More recently, I have taught thousands of managers how to lead people.
Through all these experiences, the subject of leadership keeps getting more and more fascinating. The more you dig into it, the more golden nuggets of truth you find—and the more fool's gold of misunderstanding you find, as well.
Today I'd like to address some of the common misunderstandings around leadership. They are so pervasive that they color everyone's grasp of the subject. You can call them myths. Let's briefly explore just three of these myths.
Myth Number 1: Leadership is a position on the org chart. This belief is so entrenched that The Wall Street Journal and the Harvard Business Review both commonly use the word "leadership" as a synonym for "senior management." Rarely does either publication use "leadership" to describe the hard work that goes into taking people along on a journey of change.
Leading and managing are actually both hard work, but they are fundamentally different kinds of work. Moreover, in both substance and style, different kinds of communication drive the two things. Finally, and this is key, the work of leadership must extend far into the ranks of any company that wants to grow and prosper.
Think of managing as the hard work of ensuring compliance with predetermined expectations: deadlines, budgets, standards, laws, quotas. In contrast, think of leading as the hard work of imagining, describing, and bringing about a new and better tomorrow, often in periods of uncertainty and risk.
Those new and better tomorrows are vital. They mean the world. Companies that don't embrace the challenge of change, that don't continually reinvent themselves, gradually disappear. Look at TWA, Maytag, Gillette, Schwinn, McDonnell Douglas, Oldsmobile, Wyeth, Ameritech, Amoco, and many more. Some of their brand names survive in the marketplace, but all these companies have disappeared in the last fifteen years. Just disappeared!
Few managers regard themselves as collateral leaders of the enterprise, and few executives provide for the professional development of managers into leaders. And because so many successful managers were schooled as managers, hired as managers, promoted as managers, and rewarded as managers, they are trapped in a default state of only managing things.
They even invoke the phrase "change management" to describe what should be the work of leadership. They can do better.
Myth Number 2: Communication for leadership is rudimentary, easy, and simple, and it need not be a strategic concern. After all, senior managers assume, they have been talking ever since they were toddlers, and they have been making presentations since they were management trainees. What could be simpler?
The reality is that clear, credible, compelling communication for leadership in business doesn't come naturally and intuitively to most managers. It involves all kinds of implicit, non-spoken messages that you send by means of decisions, habits, standards, assumptions, attitudes, schedules, and so much more, as well as explicit statements and questions that may inadvertently convey messages you don't intend.
Indeed, your unintentional communication can easily overwhelm your deliberate, intended messages. When you think of communication as only the stuff of PowerPoint presentations or email messages, you miss the impact of most of your communication. That's self-defeating.
Good communication for leadership requires a great deal of time, effort, and skill. Most of all, it requires sensitivity to people. But the investment is worth all the work. It pays huge dividends.
Myth Number 3: The mark of successful leadership is full alignment. Again, not true. The mark of successful leadership is full engagement. Alignment and engagement are not the same thing. In fact, they are almost opposites.
You can think of alignment as the work product, or deliverable, of good managing. You meet the pre-determined expectations that I mentioned a moment ago by aligning people and other resources with results.
Engagement is completely different from alignment. Think of engagement as the work product, or the deliverable, of good leading. It is all about people who are focusing on the right things, who are constantly searching for solutions, who are excited and enthusiastic, and who have the backbone to change themselves and to insist that others change as well.
Thus it is true that the mark of successful managing is alignment, but as we have already seen, the work of managing and the work of leading are two different things.
Companies need both good management and good leadership, and it follows that they also need both alignment and engagement. They need alignment to meet the challenges of today. They need engagement to meet the challenges of tomorrow.
Unfortunately, companies often get low marks for engagement on employee attitude surveys, but the companies don't understand engagement well enough to know what to do. So they keep on focusing on managing the company. Next year, they survey employees again, and they get similar scores. Surprise, surprise.
We discuss all this, and much more, in our celebrated Master Class workshops. We have an inaugural, one-day, open enrollment Master Class scheduled for June 26. Call us (at 847-247-2241) today to register.
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