Being a manager sounds boring, like someone who spends all day forcing workers to sweat over the assembly line. The problem with this either-or thinking is that both are needed in a well-run enterprise. Leaders focus on high-level objectives such as inspiring and motivating the team to success, which can be exciting and powerful. Managers focus on organizing, planning and overseeing daily operations and that can sound mundane. While a supervisor may excel at management or leadership, both skill sets are necessary for long-term success, both personally and for a company.
Take inexperienced managers, or those with low emotional intelligence. Such managers may concentrate on driving their teams to get the job done, without concern for the soft skills of building relationships with their team members.
But the reality is, employees tend to be less responsive to needed changes and improvements if their manager lacks the ability to build relationships.
For example, a new manager thought she was doing a great job because her data processing team met its deadlines and achieved its goals. Their frequent complaints about her management style led to her inability to get promoted and ultimately her search for another job. Luckily, a mentor helped the new manager grow her soft skills, which led to her long-term success and a series of promotions at another company. Maybe in the old days, a factory foreman could concentrate on following orders, issuing orders, organizing employees for the tasks at hand and making sure the job got done right.
Employees look to their managers for assignments, but they also look for feedback in the form of coaching, training and encouragement. Yes, those in the C-suite probably spend more time focusing on people, long-range planning, strategy and communicating the big picture than a front-line manager. Other factors enter into development as well. For one, leaders are like artists and other gifted people who often struggle with neuroses; their ability to function varies considerably even over the short run, and some potential leaders lose the struggle altogether.
Also, beyond early childhood, the development patterns that affect managers and leaders involve the selective influence of particular people. Managerial personalities form moderate and widely distributed attachments. Leaders, on the other hand, establish, and also break off, intensive one-to-one relationships. It is a common observation that people with great talents are often indifferent students.
The reason for mediocrity is obviously not the absence of ability. It may result, instead, from self-absorption and the inability to pay attention to the ordinary tasks at hand. The only sure way an individual can interrupt reverie-like preoccupation and self-absorption is to form a deep attachment to a great teacher or other person who understands and has the ability to communicate with the gifted individual. Whether gifted individuals find what they need in one-to-one relationships depends on the availability of teachers, possibly parental surrogates, whose strengths lie in cultivating talent.
Fortunately, when generations meet and the self-selections occur, we learn more about how to develop leaders and how talented people of different generations influence each other. While apparently destined for mediocre careers, people who form important one-to-one apprenticeship relationships often are able to accelerate and intensify their development. The psychological readiness of an individual to benefit from such a relationship depends on some experience in life that forces that person to turn inward.
Consider Dwight Eisenhower, whose early career in the army foreshadowed very little about his future development. Shortly after World War I, Eisenhower, then a young officer somewhat pessimistic about his career chances, asked for a transfer to Panama to work under General Fox Connor, a senior officer whom he admired.
The army turned down his request. Through some sense of responsibility for its own, the army then transferred Eisenhower to Panama, where he took up his duties under General Connor with the shadow of his lost son very much upon him. In a relationship with the kind of father he would have wanted to be, Eisenhower reverted to being the son he had lost.
And in this highly charged situation, he began to learn from his teacher. General Connor offered, and Eisenhower gladly took, a magnificent tutorial on the military. The effects of this relationship on Eisenhower cannot be measured quantitatively, but in examining his career path from that point, one cannot overestimate its significance.
I can never adequately express my gratitude to this one gentleman…. In a lifetime of association with great and good men, he is the one more or less invisible figure to whom I owe an incalculable debt. He received orders to attend the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, one of the most competitive schools in the army. It was a coveted appointment, and Eisenhower took advantage of the opportunity.
Unlike his performance in high school and West Point, his work at the Command School was excellent; he was graduated first in his class. Psychological biographies of gifted people repeatedly demonstrate the important part a teacher plays in developing an individual. Andrew Carnegie owed much to his senior, Thomas A. As head of the Western Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Scott recognized talent and the desire to learn in the young telegrapher assigned to him.
Great teachers take risks. They bet initially on talent they perceive in younger people. And they risk emotional involvement in working closely with their juniors. The risks do not always pay off, but the willingness to take them appears to be crucial in developing leaders. A myth about how people learn and develop that seems to have taken hold in American culture also dominates thinking in business. The myth is that 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.
Peer training in organizations occurs in various forms. As a result, so the theory goes, people interact more freely, listen more objectively to criticism and other points of view, and, finally, learn from this healthy interchange. Another application of peer training exists in some large corporations, such as Philips N.
Formally, both hold equal responsibility for geographic operations or product groups, as the case may be. As a practical matter, it may turn out that one or the other of the peers dominates the management. Nevertheless, the main interaction is between two or more equals.
Leaders tend to feel separate from their environment. The principal question I raise about such arrangements is whether they perpetuate the managerial orientation and preclude the formation of one-to-one relationships between senior people and potential leaders. Aware of the possible stifling effects of peer relationships on aggressiveness and individual initiative, another company, much smaller than Philips, utilizes joint responsibility of peers for operating units, with one important difference.
The chief executive of this company encourages competition and rivalry among peers, ultimately rewarding the one who comes out on top with increased responsibility. These hybrid arrangements produce some unintended consequences that can be disastrous. There is no easy way to limit rivalry. Instead, it permeates all levels of the operation and opens the way for the formation of cliques in an atmosphere of intrigue.
One large, integrated oil company has accepted the importance of developing leaders through the direct influence of senior on junior executives. The chairman and chief executive officer regularly selects one talented university graduate whom he appoints his special assistant, and with whom he will work closely for a year.
At the end of the year, the junior executive becomes available for assignment to one of the operating divisions, where he or she will be assigned to a responsible post rather than a training position. This apprenticeship acquaints the junior executive firsthand with the use of power and with the important antidotes to the power disease called hubris —performance and integrity. Working in one-to-one relationships, where there is a formal and recognized difference in the power of the players, takes a great deal of tolerance for emotional interchange.
This interchange, inevitable in close working arrangements, probably accounts for the reluctance of many executives to become involved in such relationships. Fortune carried an interesting story on the departure of a key executive, John W. The chairman evidently felt he could not work well with Hanley who, by his own acknowledgment, was aggressive, eager to experiment and change practices, and constantly challenged his superior.
A chief executive officer naturally has the right to select people with whom he feels congenial. But I wonder whether a greater capacity on the part of senior officers to tolerate the competitive impulses and behavior of their subordinates might not be healthy for corporations. At least a greater tolerance for interchange would not favor the managerial team player at the expense of the individual who might become a leader.
I am constantly surprised at the frequency with which chief executives feel threatened by open challenges to their ideas, as though the source of their authority, rather than their specific ideas, was at issue. In one case, a chief executive officer, who was troubled by the aggressiveness and sometimes outright rudeness of one of his talented vice presidents, used various indirect methods such as group meetings and hints from outside directors to avoid dealing with his subordinate.
I advised the executive to deal head-on with what irritated him. I suggested that by direct, face-to-face confrontation, both he and his subordinate would learn to validate the distinction between the authority to be preserved and the issues to be debated.
The ability to confront is also the ability to tolerate aggressive interchange. And that skill not only has the net effect of stripping away the veils of ambiguity and signaling so characteristic of managerial cultures, but also it encourages the emotional relationships leaders need if they are to survive.
Other people then have to work hard in the trail that is left behind, picking up the pieces and making it work. You can see an example of this in Lord of the Rings. At the council of Elrond, there is an argument about how they should proceed.
A study by Development Dimensions International revealed that empathy is at the top of the list of skills with the highest impact on leadership performance. According to another study by the University of Michigan, empathy levels among college students have been declining over the past few decades, which means new generations of your workforce might benefit from training in empathetic listening.
Positivity: Positive and negative emotions are contagious, but in business the power of emotion is often ignored or downplayed. People want to believe they act solely from logic and reason, and leaders tend to present information in a way that will help team members make logical decisions.
As a leader, you can in fact better influence your team by understanding the role of emotion in driving performance. Positive emotions like optimism and gratitude boost learning and motivation, while stress and fear cause a decrease. Know your style: Everyone has their own leadership style, and their own corresponding competencies.
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