Busting 8 Business Leadership and Management Myths
Are you flexing your business leadership style to suit the situation?
There are so many articles that try to position leadership versus management, it’s a leader versus a boss etc. However these ‘either or’ are traps for leaders which in all likelihood leave leaders bewildered and feeling that they are letting the side down. The truth is that leaders need to be able to draw on a spectrum of approaches and management styles to suit any given situation. Let’s explore some:
1. Leadership versus Management:
This seems to be a popular revisionist debate trying to make management a dirty word - the reality is businesses and people need to do both. Leaders influence people to achieve goals they may not have been able to reach by themselves by inspiring, stimulating, coaching, motivating, encouraging and engaging. It is intimate and personal. Managers allocate and coordinate resources to get tasks done via planning, organising, controlling and measuring. It may be somewhat impersonal, mechanical and distant. You need to be leveraging appropriate amounts of both to drive and sustain extraordinary results.
2. Exploration versus Exploitation:
A business leader must focus resources on exploiting the core business of what it’s good at to ensure its continued viability by focusing on the short-term business operations via efficiency, discipline and productivity. However, the best business leaders balance this with exploration which focuses on the long term, innovation, growth and adaptation. As Knut Haanaes says “the beauty is in the balance”.
3. Empathy versus Accountability:
Empathetic leaders display a genuine concern for their team members and can understand the needs of others, being aware of their feelings, challenges and thoughts and showing an interest in their lives. This closeness creates high trust environments, but can make it difficult for some leaders to then flex to the other side of the spectrum when required to create accountability and hold people responsible for their actions, behaviours, performance and/or decisions. Balancing accountability with empathy means that you don't just focus on the results, but also on the people involved.
4. ‘In’ the Business versus ‘On’ the Business:
Leaders often find themselves divided between the operational and strategic aspects of their job. The best business leaders know how to divide their time between on the business (working on it) and in the business (working in it). To many business leaders find themselves trapped in the whirlwind of business as usual with no time to work on the business.
5. Debate versus Dialogue:
In conversations, too many business leaders are in a rush to a result, which is facilitated by debate to bring thinking to a conclusion or recommendation which is great to drive operations. However, at other times it is necessary to have different strategic conversation(s) that create learning, perspective and insight which is through dialogue, prior to narrowing down to a decision. Leaders need to be able to do both and have the tools to do it.
6. Transactional versus Transformational:
There has been much emphasis on transformational leadership that has created expectations that leaders need to be inspirational, innovative, leading and collaborative on a daily basis. This is at odds with the need to at times utilise the transactional leadership skills of potentially managing by exception via monitoring mistakes and fighting fires, or leveraging contingent reward (ie do this this to get that). Avolio & Bass demonstrated that a leader needs to be able leverage a full range of behaviours including both transactional and transformational styles to be most effective (while trying to spend more time in the transformational space over time).
7. Stability versus Change:
Arguably if you aren't creating and leading some sort of change (from continuous improvement to disruptive innovation), you aren't leading. Disruption of the status quo enables transformation and growth of businesses and its people, but too much can result in change fatigue. Leaders must then also create a sense of certainty amongst the ambiguity and give comfort to those struggling to navigate the fog of war.
8. Passion versus Process:
Passion brings inspiration, creativity, motivation and drive whereas process brings consistency, coordination, discipline and predictable results. Entrepreneurial leaders create a business via passion and creativity, which takes a business on its initial journey (often many years). As your business grows, consistent delivery on customer expectations is driven through application of process. Your mid-sized business will only grow if you and your leaders are able to delegate and decentralise aspects of the operation which requires you to have enough process and procedures to provide clarity of direction, the ability communicate, coordinate, deliver and measure to make it work every time, while still enabling enough space for some freedom of action, innovation and creativity.
This article was contributed by Greg Allnut MNZM, Partner