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By Professor Roger Gill (November 2004 Issue)
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It’s about time we stopped ‘managing’ people and banished ‘people management’ into oblivion (apologies to the CIPD and People Management magazine). Twenty years ago, United Technologies placed a notice in the Wall Street Journal entitled, ‘Let’s get rid of management’, saying: ‘People don’t want to be managed. They want to be led … If you want to manage somebody, manage yourself. Do that well and you’ll be ready to stop managing – and start leading.’ In 2003, United Technologies was ranked the world’s most admired company in the aerospace and defence sector in the Fortune magazine survey.1

Of course, we still need management. But let’s not confuse management development with leadership development, which we need even more. We manage resources and processes, but we lead people. First, then, who are ‘managers’ and who are ‘leaders’?

In the oft-quoted words of Warren Bennis and Bert Nanus: ‘Managers are people who do things right; leaders are people who do the right things.’2 In terms of brain dominance theory, Stephen Covey says we ‘manage from the left, lead from the right’.3 And John Kotter says that management produces orderly results that keep something working efficiently, whereas leadership creates useful change; neither is necessarily better or a replacement for the other; both are needed if organisations and nations are to prosper.4 ‘For clarity of goals and direction’, Warner Burke suggests, ‘managers need leaders. For indispensable help in reaching goals, leaders need managers.’5 Actually, organisations need managers who are also effective leaders.

Unfortunately, too many managers are not good leaders. Such managers may get things done through people, but they do so by exercising position power (authority) and using the explicit or implicit threat of sanctions, thereby gaining merely compliance: ‘I do it because I have to.’ Leadership is about getting people’s voluntary and enthusiastic commitment by using one’s personal power to win their hearts and minds: ‘I do it because I want to.’

The disenchantment of people with the leadership they perceive and has, in recent years, emerged in survey after survey. The criticisms are lack of vision; poor strategic thinking and decision making; lack of integrity and trustworthiness; egotism, hubris, self-interest, greed and hypocrisy; lack of empowerment and even disempowerment of people; lack of inspirational behaviour; and inept facilitation and management of change.

Leadership development must address the serious shortcomings that the surveys reveal. We need to develop leaders who can communicate an appealing vision and mission for their team in an inspirational way. We need to develop leaders who can create a culture of shared values that support the vision and mission and that they display themselves. We need to develop leaders who can facilitate the participative formulation of intelligent strategies for pursuing the vision and mission. We need to develop leaders who can empower people to perform, by giving them the knowledge, skills, authority, freedom, resources, opportunity and responsibility to manage themselves. And we need to develop leaders who can create work and working conditions whereby people are intrinsically motivated, even inspired, to want to do what needs to be done.

First, however, we must realise that leadership development can – and should – use many and varied strategies and methods (such as transactional analysis discussed by Julie Hay in her article on page 54), both off-the-job – in classroom, self-study and experiential learning situations – and, especially, on-the-job through skilful coaching and mentoring. My research suggests that leadership development methods and strategies need to address three kinds of intelligence – cognitive, emotional and spiritual – and a range of specific behavioural skills.

Second, we must accept that training and development cannot right all wrongs in an individual. The prerequisites of effective leadership training and development are focus on specific know-how and skills, motivation to behave as a leader, and instruction, practice, feedback and application of learning. Personality, character or motivational characteristics may prevent an individual from benefiting from leadership training and development – and from being an effective leader – and these need to be identified. All too often they’re ignored, and we end up with managers who cannot lead.

Third, we must recognise that leadership development is not about producing a ‘heroic’ leader at the top of the organisational heap; it’s about developing a collective leadership capacity in the organisation as a whole. This implies that leadership development must be a whole-organisation activity, not just for a select few. ‘Distributed’ leadership is the hallmark of organisations that enjoy sustainable success and high morale.

References
1. Paola Hjelt, ‘The world’s most admired companies’, Fortune, March 2003, pp. 24–33.
2. Warren Bennis and Bert Nanus, On Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge, Harper and Row, 1985.
3. Stephen R Covey, Principle-centered Leadership, Simon & Schuster, 1992.
4. John P Kotter, A Force for Change: How Leadership Differs from Management, New York Free Press, 1990.
5. Warner W Burke, ‘Leadership as empowering others’, in Suresh Srivasta et al (eds), Executive Power: How Executives Influence People and Organizations, Jossey-Bass, 1986.


Professor Roger Gill is director of the Research Centre for Leadership Studies at The Leadership Trust Foundation and Visiting Professor at the University of Strathclyde Graduate School of Business.
 
This article is from the 2004 November issue.


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