Empowerment or enslavement?

At a Christmas gathering, a group of us chatted with “Graeme”, a maintenance engineer on a remote mining site. He described his living conditions and the challenges of fly-in/fly-out employment. When I asked him his standard work hours, he laughed and said his shift was 12 hours (7 to 7). His wry chuckle was, he explained, in response to “standard”. He often worked much longer. On his last “tour”, because the second engineer was unavailable, Graeme one night worked from 7am till 11pm. After finishing, he drove back to camp, showered and got to bed at 1am. At 3am he was awoken by a call from his duty manager, “Steve”, asking him to come back to the mine. A key piece of equipment had failed and stopped production.

At the site, Graeme found that to fix the problem he’d have to work 15 metres up a ladder, in poor light, repairing an electrical cable. This was risky work at any time, but more so as he was fatigued. Steve told him Graeme that he didn’t have to do the work (a second engineer was due at 7am); the decision was Graeme’s.

Graeme was conflicted; common sense, health and safety regulations, and company policy said “no”. But he was new to the site, and was worried about being seen to cause four hours of lost production.

Resignedly, Graeme agreed to do the work, but was very glad when the other maintenance engineer finally arrived to take over.

Most listeners to Graeme’s story thought he made the correct decision. I disagreed. I saw this as a dereliction of duty on Steve’s part. It was his job to make the decision, enforce policy, and protect his team member. Instead he chose to put himself and his company (even though the risks to both were high) above Graeme’s safety.

Afterward, I thought about Graeme’s predicament and realised that this situation, where a manager abrogates his responsibility by offloading it onto staff, is quite common. I’ve experienced this – and am almost certainly guilty of it – a number of times in my career (although not with such potentially serious consequences).

Have you had similar experiences? Why do some managers choose the “easy” (wrong?) option in such circumstances?

6 Leadership Lessons from a K-6 school

A Partnership story

Writing in the Australian Financial Review recently, Tim Dodd highlighted the success of a regional Australian primary school in lifting its scholastic performance.  He tells the story of “the remarkable partnership of a committed principal [John Picton] with an education policy specialist and mum [Jennifer Buckingham]” and how they have helped the school to be “significantly ahead of its peers”.

Lessons from RTPS

This uplifting story of Raymond Terrace PS – a previously under-achieving school in a disadvantaged area of Australia - to me has lessons for leaders in both government and business. These lessons are:

1. Be suspicious of  “common sense”, fashionable or theoretical/ideological approaches to solving complex social and organisational problems
2. Don’t adopt a solution before you understand what is really happening in the particular school (or hospital, or office, or factory)
3. To understand, immerse yourself in the school (or hospital, or office, or factory) and listen and observe - don’t jump to diagnosis
4. Engage with the students, teachers and parents (and patients, doctors, workers, managers) – they want to do better, but may not know how; they need you to help them
5. Entrench a culture of continuous student-centric improvement (customer-, citizen-centric); recognise that targets and performance-based pay produce aberrant responses and destroy pride amongst workmanship in students, teachers, staff and managers
6. Provide funding and resources only when those directly involved understand the problems and have determined how to begin addressing them, otherwise the money will be wasted.

The Core Lesson

John Picton believes that “low-income children are not condemned to perform poorly at school”.  Jennifer Buckingham has “changed her thinking”;  “It’s not a one teacher/one student situation”, she says, “ there are so many different factors which feed into” such complex organisational challenges as scholastic performance.
This is the key lesson for all leaders: to boost organisational performance, first understand the complete “system” from those struggling within it.

The BCA and yesterday's leaders

The BCA and its Plan for us

Much is being made by the Business Council of Australia (BCA) and the business media of the BCA's recent polemic against Australian 'governments', their “Action Plan forEnduring Prosperity”. The Plan has a lot of good content, particularly Part 5: Measuring Success which has a very good 'balanced scorecard' that includes indicators in three categories:

1. economic and material prosperity
2. social progress and liveability
3. sustainability.

Unfortunately, the bulk of the plan is a list of 'to dos' for the federal and state governments, mainly the federal government. Here perhaps a bit of politicking comes in – indirect criticism of the current Labor government and instruction to the (likely) incoming LNP government (despite the BCA's professed political neutrality one can see that the plan is consistent with the views of the conservative side of politics).

Yesterday's men

The biggest, and the fundamental, problem with the plan is its central thesis that what's good for business is good for the nation. This thinking is fifty years behind the times – how can these CEOs consider themselves to be community 'leaders' when their 'followers' have passed them by?

For example, the plan has over 100 mentions of “environment”. More than half of these refer to the “business environment” or similar. The others are predominantly related to environmental regulations and approvals that the BCA wants to be more business-friendly. Only one, referring to the energy sector, relates to business responsibility for environmental sustainability.

The plan is full of what the government should be doing, but little to nothing about what business is and should be doing. One can deduce that the BCA and its members feel that they are doing a cracking job and its only terrible government that is holding them back from achieving their true potential.

Self-delusion

The BCA really wants to be seen as a leading organisation in the Australian community. However, it has succumbed to the self-delusion that it, and its members: know what is good for the country; have the authority to demand that what it wants done, be done; and that their views are correct.

Their success as business people has created tremendous self-belief, which is important in a leader. However, they have fallen into believing in their own omniscience, omnipotence and infallibility.

Leadership lessons from Project GLOBE

What is Project GLOBE?

Project GLOBE is a research project that surveyed 17,000 middle managers from 61 countries to better understand the inter-relationships between societal culture, organisational culture and organisational leadership.  The leadership attributes assessed by the project are:

• Charismatic/Value-based - reflects the ability to inspire, to motivate, and to expect high performance from others based on strongly held core values; such leaders are able to create, or drive the creation of, a vision for the organisation and communicate and model that vision and inspire the organisation to pursue the vision.
• Team-oriented - emphasises team building and a common purpose among team members; this type of leader promotes collaboration and a team-based workplace.
• Participative - reflects the degree to which leaders involve others in making and implementing decisions; such leaders employ inclusive decision-making, they delegate responsibility and don't try to lead by command.
• Humane-oriented - emphasises being supportive, considerate, compassionate, and generous.
• Autonomous - refers to independent and individualistic leadership, which includes being autonomous and unique
• Self-protective – invokes a focus on the safety and security of the leaders themselves; self-centred and self-protective.

The charismatic/value-based, team-oriented, and participative stles are associated with exceptional leadership; humane orientation has some association with exceptional leadership; autonomy may impede or facilitate (both slightly) exceptional leadership; the self-protective style impedes exceptional leadership.

Leadership in the 'Anglo' countries

The following chart shows the rating on each dimension for the Anglo cluster as a whole and for Australia, New Zealand and the USA.

As you can see form the chart, the leadership style preferred in “anglo” countries is charismatic value-based with a need to be visionary and inspiring. This must be accompanied by a team orientation and a participative approach.

Societal culture and leadership

Differences across the cluster are slight, but nuances of leadership style are required depending on the culture of each country. The Project GLOBE cultural dimensions are not described here but can be found in http://www.thunderbird.edu/wwwfiles/sites/globe/pdf/jwb_globe_intro.pdf. The societal practices ('as is') scores and the societal values ('should be') for the Anglo cluster are given in the charts below.

The next chart includes the practices and values scores for Australia.

We can see a desire to be more future-oriented, more gender-egalitarian, more family-oriented, more performance-oriented and more humane-oriented, but with less acceptance of an unequal distribution of power (power distance).

The Australian Leader

WIth regard to leadership, the Australian cultural profile indicates that good leadership requires an acceptance of the egalitarian nature of the society – a leader must be 'one of us' – while not being too assertive and not exhibiting self-serving behaviour. Exceptional leadership in the USA and New Zealand will be similar but not exactly the same due to cultural and values differences. This suggests caution when applying US management approaches in other countries, even other 'anglo' countries.

Crisis in management, not leadership

This month's edition of BOSS magazine (in the Australian Financial Review [AFR]) contains a feature article on Leadership (“Crisis in business leadership”, BOSS, July 12). It's key point is that Australian "workplaces suffer a failure of leadership" according to the executives it surveyed.

It quotes John Lord, Chairman of Huawei Technologies, that Australian companies “focus, as people come up through their careers, on their management ability – are they able to drive a profit or run [the business] most efficiently – rather than leadership,” and that “management skills aren’t as important because you can build the right team around you.”

This distinction between Leadership and Management seems to have become axiomatic. The use of the term “leader” to mean the most senior manager (CEO, MD an so forth) has been supplanted by the concept that it confers leadership qualities on the managerial class. The leader has become a Leader. With this expansion in meaning has come an expansion in the assumed purview of corporate and business leaders. Not only are they leaders of their organisations, but they are national Leaders. Their words of wisdom are sought on public policy and are accepted as being in the national interest, not the narrower interests of their business. For example, the Business Council of Australia states that its membership of “business leaders” has initiated and shaped “the key economic and business reform debates that have underpinned Australia’s economic resurgence”. The AFR itself promotes this involvement by hosting “roundtables' of “business leaders” whose utterances are presented as facts rather than opinions.  By "business reform" the BCA means legal and regulatory changes that benefit business, not reforms to how their members manage their businesses.

My first text book on management (from 1982) states that leadership is an important quality of a manager, yet nowadays leadership is treated as supra-management. This would appear to be driven by two forces. The first is the desire of business people to be seen as having risen above the realm of mere manager to a higher state, from where they are entitled to speak philosophically about Management and advise politicians on how to run the country. The second force is the Leadership industry that has seized this opportunity and happily rebadged its Management offerings to meet its customers' demands. The two are symbiotic.

The evidence from many studies – such as the by the McKinsey-LSE and The Society for Knowledge Economics - and newspaper reports on poor company performance suggests that managers have not yet fully mastered what was previously known as “Management”, particularly modern management skills, the application of which requires true leadership. Perhaps they should focus more attention on the transition from Supervisor to Manager before attempting the leap to Leader.

Productivity - Management or Government

The Australian Financial Review today ran a front page article headlined “Managers blamed over productivity”.

The article is an example of the pointless either/or nature of the argument over the causes of low productivity in Australia and who should show leadership in addressing this problem.

Mediocre management

McKinsey (and others) conducted the survey cited in the article and they found that mediocre management leads to mediocre results – and Australia's score of 3 for management performance on a 1 to 5 scale is mediocre!

The US and Germany are only a little less mediocre.  It would appear that mediocrity is the global standard for management performance.

Attribution error

Managers, like everyone else, seek to blame external factors (government, unions, foreign companies) for poor company performance but attribute good performance to their own capability.  This known to social psychologists as “attribution error”.

On this, McKinsey found that government regulations restrict management action but management capability was the primary driver of company performance and that protection from competition allows poorly managed companies to survive.

McKinsey also stated that a 6% gain in productivity follows from moving the management performance score from 3 to 4.  The Total Quality Management (TQM) movement of the 80s and 90s proved that the level of waste in companies could be the equivalent of 30%-50% of revenue.

Boosting productivity through Leadership

It is clear that if business groups (and economists) want Australia’s productivity to improve they must show leadership and promote modern techniques such as Lean Enterprise.

The government must also show leadership and address restrictive labour practices and boost competition between businesses.

For further information on boosting productivity, please check the Library on my company's website

My personal philosophy of leadership, mentoring and coaching

Leadership skills and behaviours

The fundamental principle of leadership is concern for the success and well-being of followers.  The purpose of leadership is to make one’s followers successful, for through their success the leader will also be a success.  But the well-being of followers is also crucial.  There is no point winning a battle if all one’s soldiers lay dead on the battlefield.

How should a leader behave in adhering to this principle?  Firstly, a leader must always strive to make the ‘right’ decision.  Not just the correct decision, but one that is morally sound.  It is not valid for leaders to say “they had no choice”.  Leaders must not embrace determinism – that is moral bankruptcy.  Having made a decision, a leader must engage directly (face-to-face, wherever possible) with followers to develop a shared understanding, and to help followers make sense of the decision.  In these engagements, the leader must always be truthful and consistent – actions must match words.  Whatever the consequences of the decision, a leader must take responsibility for the outcome, accepting blame for failure while giving credit to the followers for any success.

Secondly, a leader must focus on “making a difference”, not on trivial matters.  Leadership is about leaps, not steps.  A leader must focus on the higher purpose of their organisation’s existence – whether it be to serve customers or a community.  This higher purpose both defines success and unites followers behind a common cause, at the same time motivating followers to strive for success.

Finally, a leader must seek to develop followers, in both their technical competence and their emotional maturity.  This requires a leader to coach and mentor followers so that they may create success for themselves.

Facets of Poor Leadership

There are three dangers or lapses that make for poor leadership.  They arise from a leaders misconception of their own capability.  Leaders fail when they believe that they are omniscient, omnipotent and infallible.

Omniscience

Leaders may suffer from attribution bias – believing that the success of their organisation (business, team, nation) is due to their own knowledge and competence.  Any failure or under-performance is due to external factors (government policy, weather, foreigners).  Leaders who believe themselves omniscient make decisions for their followers and supervise their activity.

Good leaders understand that followers know more of what is the actuality, and that they should be given support and encouragement to take appropriate action themselves.

Good leaders also understand that they are not the only possible source of leadership.  The leadership “need” depends on the context, and a good leader knows when to defer to a “better” leader.

Omnipotence

Poor leaders believe that they can lead by commandment, that what they say must happen will, in fact, happen.  Good leaders understand that this is not the case, and they devolve power to their followers.  This not only empowers the followers but, by placing power where its effect is more directly seen and felt, a leader reduces the risk of accidentally causing “undeserved harm”.

Infallibility

Good leaders accept that they will make mistakes.  They also understand that mistakes lead to improvement.  When accepting that mistakes are inevitable, a good leader takes action that minimises or mitigates the consequences of mistakes.  A good leader is always in control, without needing to exercise overt control.

Leadership Skills and Building Trust

I found two interesting papers by The Ken Blanchard Companies, Critical Leadership Skills and Building Trust, on the internet.

Critical Leadership Skills

The article reports on the findings of four studies conducted by the company, and that the critical skills are:

1. Communication/listening skills - reflective listening, use of a variety of styles, and providing relevant information
2. Effective people management skills - adapting the leadership style to suit the individual follower and the situation, modeling desired behaviours, and coaching
3. Emotional intelligence/empathy - putting the needs, issues and concerns of followers ahead of the leaders own; empathy, concern, engagement; valuing others, preserving their dignity.

Close to my own philosophy, if not performance!

Building Trust

The "high cost of low trust" has these components:

1. Low morale
2. Lower productivity
3. People 'quit but stay'
4. Increased turnover

The report finds that four elements (ABCD) of trust are:

1. Ability - demonstrated competence
2. Believable - acting with integrity
3. Connected - demonstrating care and concern for other people
4. Dependable - reliably following through on what one says one will do

The "trust busters" are

1. Lack of communication
2. Dishonesty
3. Breaking confidentiality
4. Taking credit for another's work

The "trust builders" are:

1. Giving credit
2. Listening
3. Setting clear goals
4. Honesty
5. Following through

The 8 things a leader should do to improve trust:

1. Demonstrate trust
2. Share information
3. Tell it straight
4. Provide opportunities for everyone to win
5. Provide feedback
6. Resolve concerns 'head on'
7. Admit to mistakes
8. Walk the talk

This reinforces the "critical skills" but adds more on 'how to'.

The Real Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs!

Here, in summary, are the general leadership lessons form Walter Isaacson's blog piece*.

A good leader:

1. Clearly articulates the intent of the organisation and ensures the whole organisation understands it, and conducts itself in accordance with that purpose and mission.
2. Understands the essence of the organisation's purpose and eschews activities and complications that absorb people's time and spirit, and wastes organisational resources.
3. Ensures that the organisation takes responsibility for its complete value chain - from its suppliers' suppliers to its customers' customers.
4. Encourages continuous improvement and couples this with "breakthrough" innovation 
5. Guides the organisation so that it remains true to its intent, purpose, mission and values
6. Thinks in terms of what people need, not what they want; makes a difference to the world.
7. Knows that people have more in them than they realise.  To rise to a challenge they must be motivated, and the motivation comes from their leader's confidence that they can do so.
8. Addresses not just the material needs of his/her follower, but considers (and uses to advantage) their emotional and spiritual needs.
9. Want his/her followers to have pride in their work.  This pride motivates them to do great deeds.
10. Expects his/her followers to do great things.

This is the beginning of the statement of my personal philosophy of leadership, mentoring and coaching.

*Adapted from "The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson, in hbr.org. 

Steve Jobs' Leadership Lesson 10 - Tolerate Only 'A' Players

This piece* seems a bit confused.  It starts by reporting on Jobs' trait of being "impatient, petulant, and tough" on employees.  Although "not laudable", it emanates from his perfectionism and desire to "work with only the best".  But Jobs inspired people and many stayed loyal to him for long periods.

Presciently, Isaacson warns other CEOs that they "should not emulate his roughness without understanding his ability to generate loyalty".

Unfortunately, it's easier to be rough than it is to generate loyalty!

Perhaps the more general leadership lesson comes at the end of this section of the article where Isaacson quotes Jobs as saying that "by expecting them [followers] to do great things, you can get them to do great things".  But does expectation have to be so aggressive?

*Adapted from "The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson, in hbr.org. 

What do Leaders Do?

The inaugural issue of Momentum, the University of Queensland Business School magazine, answers this question using the research and views of five of their Professors and Lecturers.
The five components of their answer are:

1. Leaders create trust
2. Leaders facilitate strategy
3. Leaders drive change
4. Leaders manager emotions
5. Leaders build teams.

A summary of the answers is given below with my comments (in italics).

Leaders create trust (Dr. Nicole Gillespie)

Trust is important for "without trust, how can a leader engender commitment" according to Dr. Gillespie.  Trust can be built in six (6) ways - empowering, coordinating, coaching, developing common values and goals, modeling competence and integrity, and benevolence.
This view is quite similar to Onora O'Neill's response to the "crisis of trust".

Leaders facilitate strategy (Dr. John Steen)

Strategy formulation, says Dr. Steen, should be a continuing conversation facilitated by the leader.  This describes a coaching role for the leader - in this article Dr. Steen has made "leader" synonymous withe "CEO".

More generally, a leader should be having "sense-making conversations" with his/her followers to maintain a shared understanding of what is required and what is acceptable behaviour and what is not.

Leaders drive change (Prof. Victor Callan)

Change must be planned and driven by the leader, according to Prof. Callan.  To do so, business leaders must have self-confidence and conviction.
This is a very "directive" view of the change managers role, perhaps missing the many other entities that create change in an organisation.  A bit too "heroic" for my taste!

Leaders manage emotions (Prof. Neal Ashkanasy)

Professor Ashkanasy's research looks into how emotions get one into "the top job" and "makes you successful" once you become the leader.  The Profs piece touches on rhetoric as motivation, modeling appropriate emotions, and emotional intelligence. 

This, to me, is somewhat akin to Kant's imperative that people be treated with respect.

Leaders build teams (Dr. Neil Paulsen)

The Doctor sees that a leaders contribution is "not about having all the answers" but is in "coordinating and connecting ideas and resources" to enable team success.  He also believes that effective leaders should "manage the context" in which the team operates.

This view of the purpose of leadership being the success of the "followers" is very much in line with my thinking on leadership.

Reflection

This is a very interesting article and quite informative.  It is one of the best I've read in the "popular" press on the topic.  And not just because the writers agree with me!

Steve Jobs' Leadership Lesson 9 - Push for perfection

Toy Story, the iPhone and the iPad are given by Isaacson* as products where Steve Jobs' showed his "push for perfection".  If one considers Steve Jobs as a product designer this conclusion seems fair.  But a leader wouldn't necessarily aim for perfection in a product, activity or outcome, in my view.

A leader would want his/her followers to have pride in their work.  That pride would motivate them to achieve great deeds (and deliver great products).

Next: Lesson 10 - Tolerate Only "A" Players

*Adapted from "The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson, in hbr.org. 

Reflections on 21722 so far (2) ...

Robert Kennedy and the Death of Martin Luther King

The rhetoric of great US political leaders

The documentary on Bobby Kennedy's speech reporting the death of King was touching and inspiring.

US political leaders so often are very good orators; their rhetoric is so often inspiring with its blend of logos, pathos and ethos.

My favourite piece

Part of a documentary I once saw about Malcolm X contained my favourite piece of political rhetoric.  Malcolm was discussing equality, refuting it as an objective of American black people.  He asked why blacks would want to be the equals of whites - those who had subjugated them, insulted them, lynched them.  He saw blacks as better than that and that they should act accordingly.

Truly inspiring.

Reflections on 21722 so far ...

A personal philosophy of Leadership, Mentoring and Coaching

The MD of King Gee at the time of the closure of the Kempsey factory had an interesting, unusual and praiseworthy approach to the closure.  He wanted staff to "leave with dignity" to celebrate the "life" of the factory rather than mourn its "death".  During class discussion, a comment was made that as MD he had "no choice" but to close the plants.  But I believe that managers always have a choice.  He could have refused to be involved, although this may not have been the best option for his employees.  He perhaps could have worked to have the factory handed over to local management and staff.  He may have had the ability years earlier to choose an approach that wouldn't lead to closure.

Hard decisions

The "hard decisions" of leadership are not necessarily those forced upon the leader or the ones that involve them sacking their followers.  The hard decisions are the ones avoided, ignored or not noticed;  that are made by default and are left unchallenged.

Competence and Morality

The structure of university management courses means that broad and underpinning topics - such as "Leadership" and "Change" - are addressed as self-contained almost independent subjects.  But I see a connection between management competence and morality.  For example, women represent 50% of the population but only 3-40% of managers are women (depending on level and industry).  Given that men and women, across the population, are of equal intelligence, an organisation where women are under-represented in management has a lower level of competence (or potential competence).
Similarly, employees who are treated as mature, honest, intelligent people (not "assets") are happier and more productive (as described in the Service-Profit Chain).
An organisation striving for high performance would therefore employ moral leadership.  Not to do so is incompetence.
The majority of organisations have incompetent management (see "Management Matters").  Improving the overall competence of management would therefore lead to more moral leadership of these organisations.

Incompetence and harm

Managers lack competence but not power.  Power allows undeserved harm to be done both deliberately and accidentally.  Even highly competent managers are capable of doing undeserved harm.  This capability can be prevented from causing harm when power is devolved.  Management approaches such as those of W Edwards Deming and Ricardo Semler devolve power to employees and so limit the potential for its abuse.
But such approaches are not the stuff of business schools.  The doing of harm continues.

Steve Jobs' Leadership Lesson 8 - Impute

The Oxford Online Dictionary defines "impute" as meaning to "assign (a value) to something by inference from the value of the products or processes to which it contributes."

In his article, Isaacson* relates this to Steve Jobs' sense of design; in particular to his emphasis on the form and packaging of a product.  He saw it as "a signal rather than being functional".

Extending this from design into the more general world of leadership, this may be interpreted as the need for a leader to address not just the material needs of his/her follower, but to consider (and use to advantage) their emotional and spiritual needs.

Next: Lesson 9 - Push for Perfection

*Adapted from "The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson, in hbr.org. 

Interesting talk last night

Last night I attended the 'launch' of a leadership coaching company, AltusQ, and enjoyed the event immensely.  A great venue (MCA rooftop), friendly crowd, and a very interesting and thought provoking talk by Andrew Mackenzie, the CEO for Australia.

Decisions not excuses

It was entitled "Don't make excuses ... make decisions" and emphasised that we shouldn't be afraid of making decisions - we make them all the time.  And we shouldn't avoid making decisions because of worry about what people may think about our decisions.  Quite insightful and motivating I thought.

Managers Leading 

This "coaching experience" conducted by Andrew was directed at the senior managers in the audience and rang true.  What interested me just as much was Andrew's comments about leaders (senior managers) setting an example, making decisions that were moral and which had employee interests at heart.  He also talked about being successful by making those who work for you successful (this is my interpretation).

This is where managers can truly be leaders - taking their employees (being, hopefully, their followers) to a "better place" in terms of how the company operates and how the employees are respected as human beings not "assets".

It reminded me again of the Deming and Semler styles of management leadership.  And made me think further about Leadership vs Management.  Will this never stop!

Leaders, "Get in Costume"!

What?

Brad Rex writes that leaders should "get in costume".  By this he means that a "leader" (he later defines leaders as "executives and managers") should spend some time working as "frontline employees".  In fact he did this for "over 1000 hours" while working for Walt Disney World (averaging around 7 hours per month).
Why?

Working with his followers, Brad learned about barriers to them providing "outstanding service" and this knowledge allowed him to fix those issues when he was "back in the office".

Real leadership

I wouldn't want to dissuade any executive or manager from spending time with their staff, but there is a "leadership" alternative.  A true leader would create an environment where employees can address the "barriers to outstanding service" themselves.  This would be much faster and more efficient than waiting for the boss to visit.  Although, to Brad's credit, he does take calls from frontline people, with whom he has "developed relationships", about new policies.
How Brad Manages Labour
He does it "intelligently", by being "acutely aware of guest traffic and deploy[ing] labour accordingly" - managing them in 15 minute increments so that their are never too few or too many staff serving customers!

Perhaps this is why the employees can't fix the problems themselves?

Steve Jobs' Leadership Lesson 7 - Bend Reality

According to his colleagues, Steve Jobs used a "Reality Distortion Field" to push people to do the impossible* and he believed that "life's ordinary rules didn't apply to him".  When a supplier complained that over confidence would not overcome real challenges, Jobs' replied "Get your mind around it.  You can do it".

A leader often has to ask the seemingly impossible of his/her followers, and followers often rise to this challenge.  The leadership lesson is that people have more in them than they and their manager or leader realise.  To rise to a challenge they must be motivated, and the motivation comes from their leader's confidence that they can do so.

Next: Lesson 8 - Impute

*Adapted from "The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson, in hbr.org. 

Managers and Leaders

I'm continuing to clarify and make cogent and coherent my thoughts on managers as leaders.  The current vogue is the make the two synonymous when talking about CEOs, in particular.  I believe that this is simply "spin" - the Management "brand" has been soiled, now we have the New! Improved! Fresh! Leader running our businesses.  Unfortunately this has given CEOs a false sense of their competency and contribution, allowing them to present themselves as experts in business, economics and politics.

Are managers also leaders?

Certainly there are times when managers are required to lead.  But one can only be leader of people, not a business or an asset or resource.  Generally, managers supervise people.  In the day-to-day events of a business, leadership is not required.  A managers responsibility is to ensure an organisation serves its customers; from this service benefits will flow to the other stakeholders.  To serve its customers, the people, activities and resources of the organisation must be planned, organised, directed and controlled, in some fashion.

Are leaders also managers?

Not necessarily, certainly not in a supervisory manner.  Followers can organise themselves.  The leaders responsibility is to serve the organisation's followers - its people (employees, in a business organisation).  This is a secondary responsibility of managers.

Managers following Leaders

Semco is a business where senior management have come closest to being leaders.  In Semco, the business is managed by the employees (the followers).  In most businesses, supervision rules, and leadership a mere platitude.

Steve Jobs' Leadership Lesson 6 - Don't Be a Slave to Focus Groups

Think in terms of what people need, not what they want.

Make a difference.

Albert Scheiwtzer (1875-1965)

Next: Lesson 7 - Bend Reality

Adapted from "The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson, in hbr.org.