“Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success;

leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.”

– Stephen Covey

I love working with leaders. I spend most of my time working with leaders. I find the art and science of leadership to be endlessly fascinating.

What I don’t like is how, at least in popular writing, there is a tendency to denigrate management. As if management is the ghetto that all good leaders escape from.

This is ridiculous and dangerous thinking.

Referencing Covey’s quote above – it doesn’t matter which wall you’ve leaned your ladder against – if no one is able to climb it consistently, quickly and safely.

Without question, many teams struggle due to a lack of leadership. However, poor management is often a greater cause for failure.

In my popular article, The Top 15 Issues That Explain Almost All Organizational Challenges, I describe how these 15 issues break down into three categories: Clarity of Purpose, Leadership, and Management.

If you want to lead powerfully, you need to practice clarity. If you want to lead sustainably, you need effective management.

Four Management Challenges That Undermine Success

1. Focusing on blame instead of cause, effect, and responsibility: When problems occur, there can be a tendency to become reactive, defensive and blaming. Blame feels like a diagnosis, but it isn’t.

I can blame someone for making a mistake, or I can understand why the mistake was made and explore how to prevent it from happening again.

Too many managers are content to assign blame and feel like that will prevent future problems.

It doesn’t. It won’t. It’ll only cause people to hide small problems until they grow into big problems.

Focus on identifying the observable behaviors or situations that created the problem. Then focus on how to correct it.

It’s less important to know who to blame and more important to know how to grow, improve and correct the situation.

2. Not accounting for risk: prevention and contingency: Broadly speaking, leaders tend to fall into two camps. Those who jump first and ask questions later and those who spend so much time calculating risk that they never jump at all.

Both are problematic. Those that jump first do tend to accomplish more. Just because they are willing to get going.

Those that focus on mitigating risk rarely encounter it because they rarely venture out.

The “jumpers” lead better. But they often struggle to make their success sustainable because they don’t account for risk.

 Both in planning and in implementation there can be tunnel vision. There is a tendency to develop zero-sum planning methods: “Either this plan is awesome, or it doesn’t go at all!”

I recently listened to the story of the SEAL raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. SEAL Team 6 always trains for what they do. In particular, they trained and planned for this mission. But nothing went as planned.

From the moment the first helicopter crashed, they were way off-script. However, they were prepared to prevent injury to themselves and to develop an effective contingency plan on the go.

It’s important to identify potential challenges and threats and develop ways to prevent them when possible, mitigate impact when prevention isn’t possible and create contingencies for when change is needed.

Successful leaders and managers don’t moan about problems and challenges. They anticipate them, adapt to them, correct them, limit their negative impact and where possible, become better because of them.

3. Mimicry—using the models of others: I’m a huge believer in mentoring and learning from others.

But I can’t cut and paste someone else’s life or success into my own.

I’ve worked with many organizations that were almost ideologically tied to someone else’s model. This might be a successful and widely known company; this might be a founder or prominent leader in your own organization’s history; this might be somebody’s system or method.

When these models don’t produce success, there is a tendency to: A) Attempt to more closely mimic the original method or B) Give up altogether. Instead, there should be a more thoughtful process of trying to understand why the model works in one context and then what can be applied to yours.

In fact, this article, how it’s written, it’s layout, it’s publication process and so on has all been based off mentoring and training I’ve received from other people.

I have had to take the time to understand the principles and why something worked for someone else. Then I adopted and applied what works for me. It’s been a learning curve that has taken me years.

However, I can’t mimic someone else and be effective. I need to retain my own voice, understand my own audience and work within my own preferences and skills.

So do you.

I use the example of others to illustrate principles. I then learn how to best apply those principles.

4. Not leveraging systems or structures: Too many small organizations undervalue the need for developing systems and structures as part of what allows sustainability and scalability.

Too many large organizations lack understanding of how to properly leverage or use their systems and structures to fully benefit from them.

Many small organizations interpret the effort and work of building useful systems and structures as a sign that this is the WRONG DIRECTION.

That’s a false interpretation of work and effort. In fact, every growing and sustainable organization is highly skilled at building the systems and structures that make success possible.

Too many large organizations forget the purpose behind their systems and structures. I once was working with one of the largest companies in the world.

As I sat down for lunch with a couple of their planners, one made a comment to the other, “What would this company be like if we ran it like a business?”

The company was so large it has basically lost track of itself. Similar to many government programs, individual teams, departments, and divisions had come to feel like little fish trying to survive in the great ocean of this company. There were focused on surviving their own ecosystem – rather than working together.

The work of that company was to learn how to help all their different components and systems to effectively work for and benefit from each other.

Effective leaders practice and respect effective management

The owner of my favorite client companies hates the word management.  So, I use it as often as I can.

He had a negative perception that management was stale. Anti-leadership.

I think he is changing though. His company is experiencing dramatic growth. This growth has only become possible with the development of strong management.

Strong management and strong leadership are having like fingers and an opposable thumb. They work better together.

Take good care,

Christian