Management Training:
Leadership Skills Vs. Management Skills
My hometown is holding its own but continues to struggle. Other towns in our region aren't so lucky. They are dying. I'm frustrated. I'm a little scared. There are literally hundreds of reasons to be anxious. Many businesses might call them "key strategic indicators". Others might call them statistics. Whatever your call them, they are specific areas of measurement to see how the entity they are relative to is doing.
In business they might be gross revenue or labor as a percentage of gross profit. In communities they might be property values, average per capita income, or total retail sales tax collections.
This article is about leadership and management. Understanding the matrix of operations is a shared responsibility of both. Thus comes the first problem facing rural communities and the question that points it out. What are the most important areas that need measured in your community? Population? Property valuations?
There are a lot of questions that must be dealt with. Consider these:
Who should be deciding what is most important to measure?
How will they be measured? Where does the information come from?
Who will measure them? What will they do with the information? How will people access it? Who will access it?
What do you do with the information once it is accumulated and processed?
The above are all good questions. Often people considering questions such as these takes what they believe to be the next step. They suggest forming a committee. The theory is that the more minds working on it the better. They believe that by getting a group together that it creates interest and the members of the committee will buy in and be helpers in accomplishing a goal. This is a good time to discuss leadership and management.
Leadership. We all attempt to define leadership. We recognize the outcomes of good leadership. Yet it is hard to clearly assess who is a great leader in advance. We would likely agree on this, behind most truly great companies there is a great leader. All the leaders are very different but all are recognized as the driving force behind the company's success.
It seems that by choosing the right person everything takes care of itself. There is a sense that a great leader has mystical powers to change a company for the better. This perception may be due to people not wanting to think too hard or pay very close attention. The great leaders I've been blessed to meet almost all have sacrificed dearly to accomplish what was needed to make a company great. In most cases no one cares. That is another article.
Then there is the not so great leader. All outward indication is that the "ok" leader had all the personality traits that great leaders have. But things don't go too well under the not so great leader. Something is different.
The difference between great leaders and the others is complicated. There are many things required to be a great leader but there is one that is uniform and almost always found in great companies. The great leader sees themselves as responsible for seeing that the vision and the effort necessary to achieve it reaches the farthest stretches of the company.
A great leader will not let anyone in the chain of command block or change the message. If the mission hits a dead link that the message can't get through the leader sees to it that this troublesome link is repaired or replaced. Under no circumstances can a dead link be tolerated. A great leader recognizes that every employee, customer, and the company's health itself is at risk. This is no different that blood through an artery. If there is a blockage, everything down line from the blockage starves of what is necessary to thrive.
The manager. This is a different story. While a very important but different role from the leader, the manager caries a heavy load with one hand firmly holding that of the leader and the other holding the team immediately behind. Everyone must do their job. The manager has to receive the message and mission, hold it true and make sure that those following do the same. The leader has a team of managers and the managers have their teams. Titles may be different but the function is clear.
Back to the community, the leader is the one asking the hard questions and working on the strategic answers to those questions. The leaders concentrate on strategic work. They own it and they are motivated by the value successful achievement brings to the group they are responsible to. How might you recognize a leader?
A leader asks hard questions that have a direct, value increasing reason for asking them. A leader doesn't see their ideas as an extension of themselves. They welcome challenge. They want the best answer. A leader is anxious to hear other's ideas but will challenge them just as they expect their ideas to be challenged. A leader recognizes weak links and immediately tries to fix them.
How might you recognize a great manager?
A great manager accepts the vision and message of the leader or the group.
A great manager is a trusted interpreter making sure those the manager is responsible for understand and adopt the message and vision as presented by the leader.
A great manager adopts the vision and adds synergy by utilizing their own strengths and skills trying to add value without betraying the vision and mission.
A great manager isn't proud and gladly accepts the will of the leader.
A great manager can share contrary points intended to improve the original outcome and not be deflated if their own ideas are not accepted by the leader.
A great manager executes on time as promised plus.
This is clearly a very short and simple perspective of leaders and managers. It is also a very important part of understanding why rural communities struggle.
Demographics and social change already pose huge challenges to our rural home communities. The temptation of greater opportunity and prosperity pulls those with greatest potential away from our community thus limiting the pool and making the places we call home victims of adverse selection.
So what do you do with all this? It is disappointing and de-motivating at best. At least it seems that way on the surface. But what this is meant to do is to get you, the reader, interested in a key factor of leadership where we started. It is meant to stimulate your creative juices and ask yourself some hard questions and well as lever some hard questions against the community to start developing your own perspective of key strategic indicators.
Are you built to be a leader? Are you built to be a manager? Or are you built to do the hard work necessary to support a manager and that in the end is what makes success possible?
One last thought about leadership and management. You can tell those who believe in their own value and their own potential by what they do to feed that potential. Here is a clear checklist to see if you are more than a warm body in a diminishing community. Ask yourself these questions:
1. Do I spend at least 4 hours a week participating in something to improve or support the community or any charitable or volunteer group in it?
2. Am I actively feeding my mind with new information that I can use to improve my life or the lives around me?
3. Am I above average in taking care of the areas that I have influence and responsibility in? Is my home and yard generally clean and well kept? Is my car or my office space clean and well kept? Am I clean and well kept?
4. Am I donating any of my income to anything to improve the world around me?
5. Do I want to live life to the fullest?
Our communities need every possible resource to turn the tide and to thrive. Your community needs you. It needs you to try, to give, and to care. It needs you to be all you can be.
William Burch:
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Subject:
Management Skills
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