Leadership or Management?

A friend gave me a hard time this week because I alluded in the last column that the term, manager, is outmoded and we should look instead to become leaders. Yet, in the citation of my name and position, I used the term, Managing Director. I thought he had me until I thought further. Hopefully, we manage things and lead people.
To succeed and prosper, any organization has three basic things that it must manage well: strategy, process inprovement/innovation, and culture.

Leadership should supply the direction or aim of the organization, and then with as inclusive of a group as possible, develop the method or strategy to achieve the aim. All employees must understand and buy into this long-term objective and the approach to reaching it.
Leadership should supply the training for all employees to understand that all work is a series of processes and they can do no better than their process will allow. Therefore, employees need to chart their work processes, understand that no process is perfect, and constantly work to improve their processes and look for better ways.
Leadership should supply the opportunity for all employees to share the behavior traits that they would like to see from their fellow workers, up, down, and across the organization. From this discussion (s), a set of Operating Principles, Behavior

Guidelines, Values, or whatever you choose to call them, can be developed to guide interaction of employees on a day-to-day basis.
The retired Director of the Juran Center for Quality at the University of Minnesota has stated that he thinks, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” I tend to think that these three things to be managed are of equal importance but this individual was stressing the importance of managing culture as it is often overlooked. Yes, culture is a thing that can be managed.
When all employees have had an opportunity to develop these behavior guidelines and have ownership of the result, they are much more likely to behave accordingly and remind coworkers of doing likewise. A simple one-page survey can be conducted of all employees quarterly on how well different parts of the organization are complying with these guidelines. The intent is not to single out individuals but to monitor how different segments of the company appear to others. Examples are peers, front-line employees, top leaders, and supervisors. The survey simply asks that each segment is to be scored on a basis of 1-10, with 10 high, for each behavior guideline. Results are shared with everyone and they can see where more focus is needed.
As the diagram shows, Leadership is at the center of each of the three activities to be managed that are important to the success and prosperity of the organization. With these activities properly managed, leadership will blossom throughout the organization and the people will lead themselves. 

Distributed Leadership

Today’s organizations cannot afford management; they need leadership! That needed leadership is not exclusive to those on the top of the organization chart but lies with each and every employee. Empowerment is a popular buzzword but deployment is typically a farce. Many managers like to say that they have empowered their reports (the people who report to them) but the employees know better. When it comes to decision time, most managers feel compelled to call the shots and leave the workers resigned to following orders, using their arms and legs, but not their brains.

Why do we have multiple layers of managers in our organizations? They:

·      Consume capital

o   Salaries

o   Bonuses

o   Perks

o   Offices

o   Equipment

·      Distort and delay communications, up and down

·      Delay decisions

o   Shielded from the real work by other managers

o   Need for research to find out what is real

o   Justify existence

A small organization might only need three levels of employees—CEO/Owner, Process Leaders, and Process Members. The organization could then be viewed as a long tube similar to a cluster of wires wrapped in a sheath of support processes. This tube can be accurately labeled as a value-added conduit. This tube would have raw materials, suppliers, our firm, distributers, and consumers in series from front to back. The term “our firm” represents your organization includes what is done internally to change inputs to outputs in the organization.

The wires inside the tube would be the key processes of the organization and include process members who do the work and a process leader. They are responsible for the success of that process and accountable for making decisions in real time. Process members and process leaders must therefore be properly selected for their positions, trained, and given authority to do what is needed and in the best interest of the customers, employees, and the owners. They should not be second guessed for errors but helped to correct mistakes and learn. It is okay to make mistakes, we are all human, as long as they are admitted and corrected quickly. A good rule to follow is, “Fix the problem and not the blame.”

The distinction between managers and leaders is important. The word manage has a connotation of control, as if the employees need to be controlled. Business schools used to teach that the proper “span of control” for any manager was between three and ten people. A manager under that thinking could be viewed as sitting in the drivers seat cracking the whip over the employees. Another type of manager, equally distasteful, is like a passenger knowing they cannot be a hard driver and ultimately successful, therefore just sit back and hope the organization is going in the right direction. A leader is out in front of the employees, leading the way and setting the direction. Leaders lead!

Much work is going on today to decrease waste, rework, and redundancy from organizations to cut costs and improve efficiency. Aren’t too many levels of management a form of waste, rework, and redundancy?

An organization is optimized when leadership responsibility is truly distributed to each and every employee and all employees become leaders.

Resources:

The New Economics, Dr. W. Edwards

Made In America by Sam Walton and John Huey

“Organizing for Empowerment”-AES, Suzy Wetlaufer

Ronald Schmidt-Zytec Corporation

Embracing a Culture of Innovation

The next big thing is unlikely to come from the same organization that brought us today’s big thing.

Innovation usually comes from without. For example, at one time IBM and the “seven dwarfs” (Burroughs, CDC, GE, Honeywell, NCR, Univac, and XDS) ruled the computer business. They did not see the emergence of the mini-computer and DEC, Data General, and Varian took the leadership as the minis eroded the big computer market. Again, these people missed out as the microcomputer industry took over and Apple, Compaq, HP, and later Dell reigned. IBM made a reemergence in the micros but later sold the micro portion of their business to a Chinese firm. Now we have tablets led by Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon and the smart phones led by Apple, Nokia, and Research In Motion are taking big chunks of the market.

Wait, there is an anomaly; Apple has transcended a couple of generations.  How did they do that, was it the freakish creativity of their leader Steve Jobs? Has he been able to instill this innovation culture in Apple, or are they doomed to be bypassed in the future like others? Time will tell.

How does one create and sustain this innovation culture? Several people addressed this question in a recent conference in Minneapolis sponsored by Advanced Improvement Systems LLC.

·      Incremental changes are no longer sufficient in a world that is operating in fundamentally different ways, build a discipline of innovation-Barb Spurrier, Mayo Clinic

·      Proposed solutions require a paradigm shift in upper management processes-Cathy Reiter, Toro

·      Virtual Participants felt more connected than live-Melissa Lenk, Cargill

·      Commercialize faster-Bob Mitchell

·      All of Deming’s theories are still relevant-Dr. Charles Liedtke, Advanced Improvement Systems

·      Electronic suggestions must include:

o   If we do this __________________

o   This will happen _____________

o   And this is why ______________

-       Sara Rose, MN Department of Human Services

Ms. Rose reported that they still have the typical suggestion boxes in the organization but they find it much more useful to use an electronic approach for speed and quality of suggestions. One caveat, the suggestion must include answers to the three questions above.

It seems obvious to be continually innovative; organizations must tap the brainpower of all employees in real time. Individuals like Steven Jobs being the one-point innovative driver in the organization are extremely rare. To attain the all-employee involvement, they must understand and be passionate about the aim of the organization. They must be empowered and enabled to make decisions as needed. This means fewer levels of management are required or even desired. Each employee must accept the responsibility to lead. Management can create the environment for empowerment but employees must step up and accept that responsibility.

There has to be some tolerance for risk taking, willingness to try creative ideas, and forgiveness of mistakes. If you do things because that is the way they have always been done, it is probably wrong. The world is changing rapidly.

Dr. Deming was fond of offering this poser, “If you want to get ahead, you have to get ahead.”

Developing an Empowered Organization

Times are changing and management/decision making must change with it. This means that decisions quite often must be made immediately and at the point of contact with the customer. Don’t you get upset when you negotiate an agreement with someone on the phone or over the inter-net and then they say, “Please wait for my supervisor”, and then you start over with someone anew. Or when you negotiate on an automobile and then the salesperson says, “Wait, I have to run it by my manager?”

One of the best-managed clients that I had was a manufacturing company in southern Minnesota named Zytec. They authorized every employee to spend up to $1,000 dollars to improve their work processes or satisfy a customer without approval. It was tremendously successful. When the CEO was asked one day by a fellow executive from another company if he wasn’t worried about the cost of such a program, he responded, “No, my front line workers are more careful about spending the company’s money than my managers are.”

Empowering the people is the necessary requirement to make decisions in real time at the opportune moment. That involves sharing the vision of the desired future state of the organization, its direction, strategy, and goals. The people must be trusted as the CEO of Zytec did. Management must listen sincerely to the people and provide information for decision-making. The need to delegate opportunities and authority, not just work. The idea is to solve problems and not blame people when things go wrong. When things go right, give the people a pat on the back and help them feel rewarded.  The trick is to encourage people without creating havoc. Needless to say, mutual trust and respect must be developed.

Creating the opportunity for empowered-employees is one thing, getting results is another thing. It has been said, “Opportunity knocks, but you have to answer the door.” The employees must take advantage of the opportunity and make the decisions. They have to listen to the customers, internal and external, and listen to the data from the work process. This often means gathering the data on themselves on their own work. They have to use their brain and have faith in themselves. They have to do what they believe is right.

The organization has the responsibility to create a work environment, which helps foster the ability and desire of employees to act in empowered ways. The work organization has the responsibility to remove barriers that limit the ability of the staff to make decisions on their own. Empowerment then needs to come from the individual.

Empowerment can be defined as the process of an individual to take action and control work and decision-making in autonomous ways. This results in more customer satisfaction and less wasted time and effort within the organization. Who wouldn’t want that?