Helping Managers Become Better Leaders

John Renesch's book Leading in a New Era, featured a chapter from Warren Bennis entitled 'The Leader and The Chief Transformation Officer' in which he distinguished between the role of managers and leaders as follows 

Management is getting people to do what needs to be done. Leadership is getting people to want to do what needs to be done. Managers push. Leaders pull. Managers command. Leaders communicate. 

While this classic distinction is often recognised, a recent post on the ThoughtLeaders website entitled 'How to Find Balance Between Leadership and Management' provides insight into how managers can bridge the gap towards better leadership, even in their current management roles

What we need today are managers who lead, inspire and motivate employees to achieve business-wide goals. Relying too heavily on one or the other can be detrimental.

A large part of being a productive leader is to build and foster relationships with employees and to encourage employees to build solid relationships with one another. Looking at the long term, healthy relationships in the workplace build an environment where employees want to complete their tasks and are not forced to do so, where they would otherwise grow to resent you as a manager. Finding a balance between management and leadership can come down to healthy relationships, inspiring staff and a productive environment that fosters growth and achievement. 

Four key components in building these healthy relationships are then described as 

• Employee awareness - keeping in regular contact with employees, hearing about what they are doing and what they have on their plate 
• Accountability - holding employees accountable for their tasks and to do lists 
• Empowerment - offering guidance to employees but letting them make decisions when possible 
• Inspiring, not controlling - not deterring employees from reaching out and taking educated risks

Each of these outcomes are very familiar in the work FranklinCovey does with clients. For example, when keeping in regular contact with employees we know that effective listening skills are important as is the ability to give and receive feedback, so these are specific areas of focus in the development support we offer. Likewise, accountability at an individual level features for us in the 'win-win agreement' format we recommend between managers and employees, which is distinctive in that it allows for both parties to hold each other to account for the commitments they make. At a business unit level, we also help the manager create conditions where the team are as much accountable to each other as they are to the manager, which can create a powerful dynamic.   

To support a culture of empowerment we work with managers to avoid the extremes of 'micromanagement' or 'abandonment', and instead enable them to 'clear the path' ie running alongside and supporting people as they work towards mutually agreed upon goals. Finally, to ensure that managers can 'inspire' others, we develop in them a mindset of 'release' (rather than 'control') and then support this with the skills to identify where people's passions and capabilities lie while being able to judge the level of initiative they should allow in any given circumstance.