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Becoming a Leader … Part One
Posted by Joseph Riggio on Tuesday, October 10, 2006Are we truly “over-managed and under-led” ... and if so what does that mean?
Maybe leaders at every level need to become more familiar with chaos ... giving up all desire for the perception of comfort that comes with the sense of being in control.
Good Evening,
I spent a long day teaching today in NY. As an adjunct professor in the Design & Management program at of Parson's, part of the New School University, I get to meet other professors in the department. Now this department has some unique characteristics. Parson's has just been ranked one of the top design schools in the world in Business Week's “first-ever survey of design schools and design programs in the U.S., Europe, and Asia that are graduating the innovators companies hunger for.” There are literally world-class scholars, designers and artists wandering the halls (and sometimes teaching) that I'm interacting with regularly.
One of the most interesting things about the program I'm teaching in has to be the nature of the intersection between design and business that resides at the core of this program. The program offers a BBA (Bachelor's of Business Administration) so officially I teach in a business program within a design school. That alone makes the program unusual, if not unique. After each long day of teaching in this program I wonder, "Who has learned more this day ... me or my students?"
I find that many of the skills I bring to the classroom come from my many years working with business leaders and organizations internationally. Essentially these skills include:
This will give you some sense of what it takes to run a class effectively. As I said skills similar to what it takes to run a successful department or business. Of course in a "real business" there are other skills what would have to be present as well, including:
Again, I'm guessing you get the picture. These skills are actually present as well, just provided for by others within the university setting. The more I look closely in fact the more I recognize just how much a a "business" academia actually must be to survive.
Amid this activity I have found myself recruited to sit on a committee to plan a Master's degree program. I'm quite "chuffed" at this request and opportunity. The process of working with full-time academics has been most enlightening so far. However, none of this forms the reason for today's posting.
Within this mix one of the other professors on the Master's program committee has used the phrase, "We are over-managed and under-led" repeatedly. This phrase strikes me deeply in some way. First of all, what does it mean to be over-managed and under-led?
As an old (Peter) Drucker fan I read often from his writing about "management" and his lack of distinction between management and leadership. It seems that for this famous professor of business, management and leadership were considered two sides of the same coin. Yet I do understand the comment coming from my colleague about being "under-led." I understand for instance the difference between managing a project or process and leading people.
In my opinion at the heart of management resides a quantitative, linear process vs. a qualitative, non-linear process for leadership. Management seems to me to be all about "outcomes" whereas leadership seems to me to be all "vision." This distinction may be best summed up best by saying that, management attends to what must get done in the present - while leadership attends to where a group, organization or business wants to be going in the future.
Now in order to succeed at leading the leader must be aware of the present conditions just like the manager. However, they must not become trapped by these conditions or the present. Leaders must free themselves from the constraints of the present to focus on the future possibility that they are responsible for making happen through their leadership. Primarily, leaders must create the contexts where the outcomes they intend become manifest. This differs from management as I have defined it greatly - where the leader creates the context where the intended outcomes become manifest, managers are directly responsible for producing the intended outcomes.
It might appear that the difference I am suggesting may be subtle, yet I do not think this so. The distinction between creating a context where the outcomes that are intended can be produced and producing those outcomes are in fact radically different in terms of attitude and action. When the leader shifts their attention to the creating of contexts their vision widens dramatically. Instead of fixing their attention on the more narrow aspect of producing the outcomes at hand, leaders must attend to the much larger system within which the outcomes will be produced.
Leadership coaching and/or consulting must therefore shift focus to the construction of context vs. the attention on outcome that management consulting fixates upon. One of the significant aspects of this shift of focus will be the shift from a quantitative, linear process oriented methodology, to a broader qualitative, non-linear methodology. From my perspective this may be addressed by shifting the intention held from managing or controlling chaos to an intention to generative familiarity and appreciation for chaos.
All opportunity resides in chaos ... not in the "management" of chaos but in the willingness to play within the chaos without attempting to control or conquer it in any way ... in fact the greater the chaos often the greater the opportunity.
Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
Princeton, NJ
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(1) Comments • (1) Trackbacks • Permalink
Wow. I could comment volumes on this blog. I don’t know where to start, so I won’t for now - for the most part. I will say though that although I know you’re talking about leadership, I have been dealing with some of these issues mentioned in this blog post as it relates to evaluation, a huge part of the work I do as well as my main interest professionally. Quant. vs. Qual. leadership...well, I completely get this b/c I can connect it to evaluation approaches - evaluationg outcomes (more linear) vs. evaluating systems change/collaboratives (non-linear - more vision centered and “chaotic"). I’ve been exploring methodologies and approaches on how not to take the system apart in order to evaluate it, which in the world of evaluation is certainly a radical idea! Evaluating the whole system is tricky, but I know incredibly useful and more “telling” than taking it apart. Well, I really could go on and on about all this, but another time perhaps.
Thanks,
Allison
