Is it Management or is it Leadership?

Preamble:

This was written in 2001, but it would seem as apropos as it was then. It is a condition that a writer/philosopher who sees repeatedly the same things happening as if they were fixed in a time freeze zone. To him, it would appear we learn slowly, and then only when we have no other options. Clearly, we are addicted to "progress" while failing to see that this is because we have a "management" mentality rather than a leadership orientation. We are fond of measuring things rather than qualifying the impact of things on people, and ultimately on the life of this planet. We are quantifiers, left brain thinkers, reducing everything to mathematics or stoichiometric equations. We fail to see the qualitative impact of this fixation until it is too late for damage control.

The irony is that we champion our human consciousness, but choose to ignore the fact that most of us sleepwalk through life, unaware of much outside our habitual routine. We drive ourselves away from reality with noise we call music, with the worship of celebrity as the new religion, and preoccupied with deviant behavior as media entertainment.

It is for this reason that I have paid special attention to the dichotomy between management and leadership. We have lost our moral compass and our way.

Doubtlessly, we have many good managers, but few good leaders. With management, ends justify means. Managers drove the Greeks into Persia, the Romans into nostalgia, the Spaniards into New World exploitation, the Englishmen into colonial hedonism, and now the United States into moral policemen of the world.


The United States Congress attempts to manage the social security crisis rather than lead the nation out of debt. The National Pastime, baseball, is trying to manage the steroid crisis instead of preserving the integrity of the game. The Catholic Church is managing the pedophile abuse crisis of priests instead of establishing a philosophy leading the Church into the twenty-first century. Corporate management is managing the crisis in corporate scandal instead of leading to a restructuring of organization to fit the character of personnel and the times. The government and military attempt to manage the insurgency crisis instead of understanding what creates insurgency and therefore what might neurtralize it.

There isn't a front in our society that hasn't, as my da was fond of putting it, "that doesn't have everything ass backwards." A little article isn't going to change anything, so why write? As the Roman Seneca once said, "My role is to report; your role is to change things."

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Is it Management or is it Leadership?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
(Copyright January 2001)

First feed the troops, then the officers. The running of the corporation belongs to the workers. If there is to be a bonus rule, the same rule should apply to the workers and managers alike when it comes to special compensation. Management, believing it holds the ‘Keys to the Kingdom,’ gives itself ‘Nobel Prize-like’ awards, while giving the troops ‘baubles and beads.’ Management, as a word, should be eliminated: inventories can be managed, people led.

Ross H. Perot
Fortune Magazine
February 15, 1988

The dust has settled since Ross Perot published his manifesto on “How I would turn around GM.” Perot got on the General Motors Board of Directors, and was so disruptive, that he was subsequently bought out at great relief to the other board members. Obviously, a provocateur is neither a leader nor a manager, but simply that, a provocateur. Still, what Perot insisted has merit. The problem is that persuasion is an emotional factor and takes time, education, understanding and patience. Good people differ because they look at similar things differently. On the other hand, not such good people will remain insensitive to the facts as long as they can stand the tide. Where Perot is correct is in his insistence that management and leadership are not the same. Therefore, it might be of some use to look at how they differ and why.

Management expects to solve its problems while essentially maintaining the structural integrity of the organization, failing to realize the structure may be the problem. Leadership recognizes the folly of this cosmetic approach seeing the organization in the midst of a revolution. The shift from position power to knowledge power has necessitated the dismantling of the command and control philosophy of organization to a more relevant and realistic relational model.


MANAGER/ LEADER

Cop/ Cheerleader
Referee/ Enthusiast
Devil's Advocate/ Nurturer
Naysayer/ Coach
Pronouncer/ Facilitator
Manipulator/ Enabler
Evaluator/ Counselor
Arranging and Telling/ Mentoring









Management encourages the philosophy of positive thinking and possibility thinking because it sees the worker as a psychological machine, which can be molded and fashioned into an organization man. Leadership understands man is not an object to be force fitted into the role the organization demands of him, but is a complex entity with a myriad of choices. Leadership allows itself to be surprised and benefited by these choices.

Management puts the emphasis on results (success) and therefore unwittingly courts imitation, stagnation, and sterility. Leadership embraces process (where failures do occur) as the price of growth and development. Leadership recognizes that only through risk, pain and, uncertainty, going forth boldly not being afraid to be ludicrous, not being afraid to let the group down is the only formula for real progress.

Management has a mania for control, which finds it inclined to micromanage out of a distrust of those that do. Leadership realizes the only way to truly control is to let go of control. The very process of controlling something breeds a kind of disorder. Looking at people, processes, and problems too closely, becoming too obsessed with control therefore leads to chaos, not order.

Management is a mechanistic art form independent of that which is managed. In that context management functions best in a staid, repetitive environment, where there are routinized, uniform, and conventional practices. Management is inclined to fail when forced to cope with radical change, or where there is an explosive transition to another form. Leadership is a creative art form, which is most dependent on that which is managed. Leadership functions best in a state-of-the-art, frontier technology, and dynamic operation, where chaos, and ambiguity take residence. Leadership must therefore be quite knowledgeable and understanding of the subtle nuances of that which it does.

Tom Peters: "Once you become a manager you give up honest work for the rest of your life."


Management expresses its will and it is manifested, and the organization is diminished. Leadership allows the will of the followers to flourish and the organization is enhanced.

Management is inclined to support the theory of doing everything right the first time regardless of its relative importance. Leadership concentrates on the critical mass of the few right things, which spell the difference between success and failure.

Management, for its insistence on compliance, conformity, politeness, obedience, harmony, and subservience, has unwittingly educated responsibility and accountability out of the workforce, replaced by learned helplessness and nonresponsibility. Leadership gives workers control of what they do, the freedom to do it, and the trust that they will do it well. Through coaching and counseling, leadership encourages workers to take calculated risks and to accept failure as the price of individual initiative. And for this attention, leadership realizes cooperation.

Management functions as a mechanistic design of several discrete parts – research & development, engineering, production, etc. The objectives of these functional groups are often in conflict. The focus and reward system is based on functional group success, not organizational success. Leadership functions as a fluid system of interdependent parts. If any one part is functioning as well as it might, than the organization isn’t. Therefore, the focus and reward system is on success of the system, not on any discrete function.



MANAGEMENT VERSUS LEADERSHIP

FROM/ TOWARD

SELF-CONTROL/ SELF-REALIZATION
DEPENDENCE/ INTERDEPENDENCE
ENDURANCE OF STRESS/ CAPACITY FOR JOY
LIFETIME EMPLOYMENT/ LIFETIME ENJOYMENT
EXISTENCE/ LIVING
MECHANISTIC PROCESSES/ ORGANIC PROCESSES
COMPETITIVE RELATIONS/ COLLABORATIVE RELATIONS







Management is a survival strategy. Survival is predicated on the maintenance of the status quo. This encourages empire building and contributes to forward inertia. Leadership is a developmental strategy. It focuses on continuous improvement and attempts to grow the business by challenging the status quo.

Management is good at managing things, but poor at managing people. Therefore, it fails to deal effectively with people’s natural suspicions and inclination. For people to commit to anything, they must first fight for clarity and understanding before they voluntarily reach agreement. To bypass suspicion and fight is to sue for agreement by bribing (through incentives), intimidating (through fear or non-inclusion), or manipulating people to satisfy the interests of management. These are coercive tactics commonly employed by management. It may realize compliance, but never cooperation. Cooperation is always voluntary. People cooperate when they have a clear understanding that their interests are at heart and being protected. They don’t need to be bribed. They need to know what is expected of them and why, and how they might best realize the objective. Management seeks cooperation but settles for compliance. This is in no small way due to its lack of people skills, and the patience to bring people on board to support the objective. Leadership, on the other hand, knows if the people are not committed to the objective, it cannot lead. It understands the key to cooperation, communication, and collaboration is to perceive and promote the common interests: First perceiving, then exercising the collective will do this.

Management mirrors the age of the machine. Leadership mirrors the age of the system.

Management has difficulty confronting and dealing with change. It has a huge investment in the culture of the status quo. This finds it owning a problem it cannot solve, that is, attempting to manage operations with an authority it no longer has, and a position power, which is now anachronistic. Leadership accepts the reality – the chaos, conflict, ambiguity – and goes with the flow. It creates a climate of contribution in which knowledge power can eventually find its wings to soar. It accepts setbacks, disappointments, surprises, and failures in stride as the price of success. Leadership never owns the problem. It belongs to everyone as the answers reside with those who do. It recognizes the purpose of a system is what it does, not what it says it does, or would like to do. Leadership recognizes it is not the celebrity of a few, but the mindset of the many that makes things happen.


RELATIONAL MODEL OF LEADERSHIP

AUTHORITY THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS
LOYALTY THROUGH RELATIOSHIPS
DISCIPLINE THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS
MOTIVATION THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS






Management is inclined to see things in broad generic terms, and pushes for excellence across the board indiscriminate of what is most important. Leadership is discriminating, that is, it focuses on the chronic few problems. It examines processes to determine the problem’s source, than leverages resources to eradicate it. Leadership knows that the 20 percent critical few problems determine 80 percent of the return on the investment in time, energy, resources, and operations.

Management has the hubris to believe it can manage anything irrespective of its knowledge of that enterprise. Leadership knows it must first be a student of that which it manages, before it can demonstrate the ability to lead. Once it is satisfied it possesses such knowledge, it must know the people. This is because the key to every business is its people, and the knowledge, skill, and experience of those people. Complicating this problem further, the people differ from one industry to another, one discipline to another, one operation to another, and when the operation is in another state or country, one people to another.

Management focuses on the bottom line, which encourages a lot of cheating. Leadership focuses on chronic problems, which represent barriers to the bottom line.
Crisis management persists as standard operating procedure with management because crises are rewarded. The crises management solves are the crises it creates. Crisis management is an embarrassment to leadership and is avoided by developing systems, which acknowledge and deal with previous pitfalls, also known as chronic problems.

Management struggles with crises as an endurance contest, developing a capacity to spawn crises as well as a capacity to dispatch them. Leadership embraces crises as part of the process of growth.


The Most Reverend Thomas MacGraff, S.J., Ph.D., Psychologist:

"It is important to note that information is not operational. Nobody ever did anything because they knew. Think of that. What actually happens is that you take advantage and dump it into human experience, and it comes out felt knowledge. And
felt knowledge is value. And value moves people to do, to
believe, and to be motivated."





The perception, rather justified or not, is that management is committed to the stockholder, the customer, itself, then its workers. This makes for a short-term perspective with warped loyalty to its purposes. An emphasis on now is often at the expense of the future. Leadership is committed to its vision of what can be, and forces act, positively and negatively, on that vision. Leadership is first and foremost of, for, and by the people being led. Its objective is in bringing the future into the present while maintaining healthy contact with the past, with a grudging concern for the present. It takes nothing for granted, and the people being led least of all.

Management promotes internal competition, which leads to functional divisiveness. Leadership promotes cooperation, which leads to consensus building, collaboration and functional interdependence.

We are in a new century, still haunted by the problems encounter in the old. We find the typical organization today in a paradoxical dilemma. It is faced with anachronistic leadership and atavistic followership.

Leaders are looking through the rear view mirror, and wondering why they can’t see ahead. Followers are frustrated with their management, when they are confronted with the demands of leadership roles. This situation is product of the power shift from doing to thinking, from conforming to contributing, from central authority to decision making at the level of consequences. Faced with this dilemma, management often resorts to emergency tactics and calls them strategies. Meanwhile, followers, like spoiled brats, wait to be rescued by their surrogate (management) parents.
The litany of downsizing, redundancy exercises, streamlining, refocusing, reengineering, plant closings, plant relocations, and mergers is nothing less than a confirmation of this, or the personification of schizophrenic management. By that is meant that management is delusional as it attempts to operate from a power base of hierarchical authority, when the pyramid no longer exists. Management, it would seem, has lost its moral compass and cannot find its way.

Reality is subordinated to the expedience of corporate deception. Nothing is as it seems. No one is in control due to management’s unwillingness to face its declining corporate authority.

Sigmund Freud:

"It is only through pain that our level of awareness, our conscious mind increases. Therefore, comfort reduces our awareness, while increasing the power of cognitive dissonance. We see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, feel what we what to feel, think what we want to thing . . . all to our eventual despair."





Workers have a gigantic problem to overcome in their own right. Over the past century, they have fallen prey to learned helplessness and nonresponsibility, not only in the workplace, but also in the home and school as well. This is due to the removal of consequences of their actions. Much is made of workers alienation and passivity from their employment in mass production and assembly line manufacturing. What is seldom mentioned is their alienation from consequences of their actions. For being punctual, polite, passive, obedient, obsequious, conforming, and reactive, they have been blessed with surreal comfort.

This finds workers today, on the one hand, the most skilled and intellectually sophisticated in history, but on the other, emotionally suspended in terminal adolescence. Management, in the 20th century, created a monster, workers with the emotional maturity of twelve-year-old children, and at a time when mature adult workers are critical to success.

You see when workers take their problems to the streets with placards of complaints before television cameras, rather than using that energy to devise solutions to company problems, then sell management on them as co-partners in their benefits. You see it when workers subscribe to the cult of victim hood, as if they had no power when they, indeed, are the most powerful factor in the workplace. You see it when they sue for higher wages and greater benefits without a thought as to how their performance might justify these demands.

Henry David Thoreau:

"Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only indispensable, but positively hindrances to the elevation of mankind."




The pyramid is shrinking, replaced by horizontal coordination, communication, and cooperation. It is for that reason that the rationale for this transformation is presented here.

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See James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. books and articles as presented on Dr. Fisher's website: www.Theperipateticphilosopher.com