CORPORATE | Leaders and Managers, Part 2

Leaders and Managers, Part 2

MANAGERS AND LEADERS: ARE THEY DIFFERENT? 
Leadership Inevitably requires using power to influence the thoughts and actions of other people. Power In the hands of an individual entails human risks

1. the risk of equating power with the ability to get immediate results
2. the risk of ignoring the many different ways people can legitimately accumulate power
3. the risk of losing self-control in the desire for power Collective leadership Managerial ethic Inherent conservatism



An organization is a system, with a logic of its own, and all the weight of tradition and inertia. The deck is stacked in favor of the tried and proven way of doing things and against the taking of risks and striking out in new directions. Out of this conservatism and inertia organizations provide succession to power through the development of managers rather than individual leaders. And the irony of the managerial ethic is that it fosters a bureaucratic culture in business, supposedly the last bastion protecting us from the encroachments and controls of bureaucracy and education. Perhaps the risk associated with power in the hands of an individual may be necessary ones for business to take if organizations are t break free of their inertia and bureaucratic conservatism.

Manager vs. leader personality Features of a managerial culture Rationality and control Management consists of the rational assessment of a situation and the systematic selection of goals and purposes (what is to be done?), the systematic development of strategies to achieve these goals; the marshalling of the required resources; the ratonal design, organization, direction, and control of the activities required to attain the selected purposes, and finally the motivating and rewarding of people to do the work. A manager is a problem solver Whether his or her energies are directed toward goals, resources, organizations, structures, or people A manager requires that many people operate at different levels of status and responsibility Leadership is a practical effort to direct affairs, and to fulfill his task It takes neither genius nor heroism to be a manager But rather persistence, tough-mindedness, hard work, intelligence, analytical ability, and perhaps most important, tolerance and good will Only great people are worthy of the drama of power and politics Another assumption, however, attaches almost mythical beliefs to what leadership is Leadership is a psychodrama In which as precondition for control of a political structure, a lonely person must gain control of him or herself Two questions: 1. Is this mystique of leadership merely a holdover from our collective childhood of dependency and our longing for good and heroic parents? 2. Is there a basic truth lurking behind the need for leaders that no matter how competent managers are, their leadership stagnates because of their limitations in visualizing purposes and generating value in work? If indeed problems demand greatness, then judging by past performance, the selection and development of leaders leave a great deal to chance. There are no known ways to train “great” leaders. Furthermore, beyond what we leave to chance, there is a deeper issue in the relationship between the need for competent managers and the longing for great leaders. What it takes to ensure the supply of people who will assume practical responsibility may inhibit the development of great leaders. Conversely, the presence of great leaders may undermine the development of managers who become very anxious in the relative disorder that leaders seem to generate. Managers and leaders are very different kinds of people They differ in motivation, personal history, and in how they think and act A technologically oriented and economically successful society tends to depreciate the need for great leaders. Such societies hold a deep and abiding faith in rational methods of solving problems, including problems of value, economics, and justice. But there are times when tinkering and trial and error prove inadequate to the emerging problems of selecting goals, allocating resources, and distributing wealth and opportunity. During such times, the democratic society needs to find leaders who use themselves as the instruments of learning and acting, instead of managers who use their accumulation of collective experience to get where they are going. Managerial Viewpoint Alfred P. Sloan Good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization, or decentralization with coordinated control There is no hard and fast rule for sorting out the various responsibilities and the best way to assign them. The balance which is struck… varies according to what is being decided, the circumstance of the time, past experience, and the temperaments and skills of the executive involved. Managers and leaders differ fundamentally in their world views. The dimensions for assessing these differences include manager’s and leaders’ orientation toward their goals, their work, their human relations, and their slaves. Manager vs. Leader Personality If indeed problems demand greatness, then, judging by past performance, the selection and development of leaders leave a great deal to chance. What it takes to ensure the supply of people who will assume practical responsibility may inhibit the development of great leaders. The presence of great leaders may undermine the development of managers who become very anxious in the relative disorder that leaders seem to generate. A technologically oriented and economically successful society tends to depreciate the need for great leaders. Managers and leaders differ fundamentally in their world views the dimensions for assessing these differences include managers’ and leaders’ orientations toward their goals, their work, their human relations, and their selves. Attitudes Toward Goals Managers tend to adopt impersonal, if not passive, attitudes toward goals. Managerial roles arise out of necessities rather than desires, and therefore are deeply embedded in the history and culture of the organization. Leaders are active instead of reactive, shaping ideas instead of responding to them. Leaders adopt a personal and active attitude toward goals. The influence a leader exerts in altering moods, evoking images and expectations, and in establishing specific desires and objectives determines the direction a business takes. The net result of this influence is to change the way people think about what is desirable, possible, and necessary. Conceptions of Work Leaders and managers differ in their conceptions. Mangers Managers tend to view work as an enabling process involving some combination of people and ideas interacting to help establish strategies and make decisions. Managers help the process along by a range of skills , including calculating the interests in opposition, staging and timing the surfacing of controversial issues, and reducing tensions. In this enabling process, manager appear flexible in the use of tactics: they negotiate and bargain, on the one hand, and use rewards and punishments, and other forms of coercion, on the other. Leaders Leaders work in the opposite direction, to develop fresh approaches to long-standing problems and to open issues for new options. Leaders work from high-risk positions, indeed often are temperamentally disposed to seek out risk and danger, especially where opportunity and reward appear high. For managers, the instinct of survival dominates their need for risk, and their ability to tolerate mundane, practical work assists their survival. The same cannot be said for leaders who sometimes react to mundane work as to an affliction. Relations with Others Managers Prefer to work with people, they avoid solitary activity because it makes them anxious. Managers relate to people according to the role they play in a sequence of events or in a decision-making process, while leaders, who are concerned with ideas, relate in more intuitive and empathetic ways. The distinction is simply between a manager’s attention to how things get done and a leader’s to what the events and decisions mean to participants. The Game Theory Managers have taken the notion that decision-making events can be one of two types: 1. The win-lose situation (or zero-sum game) 2. The win-win situation in which everybody in the action comes out ahead. As part of the process of reconciling differences among people and maintaining balances of power, managers strive to convert win-lose into win-win situations. Senses of self Two basic personality types 1. Once-born 2. Twice-born Once born Those for whom adjustments to life have been straightforward and whose lives have been more or less a peaceful flow from the moment of their births The sense of self – derives from a feeling of being at home and in harmony with one’s environment Twice born Thos who have not had an easy time. Their lives are marked by a continual struggle to attain some sense of order. They cannot take things for granted. The sense of self – derives from a feeling of profound separateness A sense of belonging or of being separate has a practical significance for the kinds of investments managers and leaders make in their careers. Managers see themselves as conservators and regulators of an existing order of affairs with which they personally identify with and from which they gain rewards. Leaders tend to be twice-born personalities, people who feel separate from their environment, including other people. Development of Leadership The development of every person begins in the family. Each person experiences the traumas associated with separating from his or her parents, as well as the pain that follows such frustration. In the same vein, all individuals face the difficulties of achieving self-regulation and self-control Self-perceptions can come to nothing if the individual’s talents are negligible. Even with strong talents, there are no guarantees that achievement will follow, let alone that the end result will be for good rather than evil. While apparently destined for a mediocre career, people who form important one-to-one relationships are able to accelerate and intensify their development through an apprenticeship. Mentors take risks with people. They bet initially on talent they perceive in younger people. Mentors also risk emotional involvement in working closely with their juniors. Can Organizations Develop Leaders For leaders, personal influence and the one-to-one relationship is important One-to-one relationships For organizations to encourage consciously the development of leaders as compared with managers would mean developing one-to-one relationships between junior and senior executives and, more important, fostering a culture of individualism and possibly elitism. Elitism arises out of the desire to identify talent and other qualities suggestive of the ability to lead and not simply manage. Peer Training People learn best from their peers. Supposedly the threat of evaluation and even humiliation recedes in peer relations because of the tendency for mutual identification and the social restraints on authoritarian behavior among equals.