Managers and leaders differ in one major way, the specific detailed development of others. Yes, managers can and do develop people and generally in one of three ways, two of which are not conducive for an environment of development and growth.
- Micro-Management, people are sock puppets, not given any decision making abilities and the manager will meet out all as they see fit. One may ask how does this develop people? People, despite common belief, are smart, and are pattern recognizing animals so they learn what to expect from the micro-manager. Before they lose care due to abuse they try to help by pre-arranging or executing minor things in an effort to contribute to the needs of the micro-manager. However, this is clearly outside their scope (any thought), contributes to defects and waste (not zero defect), due to these deficiencies they are then scolded by the micro-manager and let go.
- Sink or Swim Management, provides challenges to their people with varying levels of resource and instruction; generally, portions of both are missing, sometimes mission critical items, surprise. People either rise to the occasion and succeed, bringing praise to the manager or fail in which they are verbally bluggend about the cost to the company, their lack of intelligence and let go.
- The Good Manager, Provides varying levels of challenge to their people and ensures they are correctly resourced and instructed. People rise to the occasion and succeed or fail, the manager credits their people for success or takes the hit for failure. They will discuss the failure with their people in detail. However, they do not conduct specific development of their people to correct for the deficiencies. The educational tools utilized are the failure itself and the after action review. It is incumbent on the people to seek out their own specific development to fill in the gaps. Future failures are met with pigeon holing, demotion or being let go.
Leaders by contrast practice not management but Leadership, of which management is a portion. The tools utilized in managing resources are universal and a leader must be well versed in their applications, limits and impacts. However, the leader employs them in a much more nuanced fashion as they are interwoven with people to maximize the utility of both. People magnify or diminish ALL other resources, primarily time. As a leader time is one’s most precious resource, like altitude to an aircraft, and so the goal is to maximize the ROI on this diminishing resource. A leader accomplishes this through Leadership, the art of the relationship of managing resources and the specific development of one’s people; a leadership apprenticeship. Leadership for all intent and purposes is a trade: apprenticeship, journeyman, lead technician and master craftsman. However, as one ascends the rungs over time it becomes less about one’s industry and more about the application of trade universally.
The Charges
First and foremost understand that one is to undertake the development professionally and personally of ALL their charges (staff, employees, and interns). This goes for all leaders from the Chairman of the Board to the Chief Floor Sweep. ALL is important because it sets the culture/tone/foundation for the firm. It sets out through actions that everyone is important to the success and failure of the team. There is no goading the kicker for missing the last second field goal because the team knows “WE” lost because of “OUR” failures which led to this point.
The leader starts by meeting each person at his or her own current place in life, professionally and personally, and begins the task of reinforcing and adding to strengths, starts evaluation and development of weaknesses, and charting a course for current and potential opportunities, professional and personal.
A leaders goal is three fold:
- Weave one’s charges into a capable and competent team that can plan, problem solve and persistently execute on a day to day basis.
- Allow the leader time to do the higher level strategic planning needed, i.e. the math on paths to pursue so efforts are truly fruitful.
- Creates opportunities internally for the firm to grow and externally for staff that the firm cannot retain as they mature into levels outpacing the firm’s ability to absorb them.