Mark Shead - Leadership501

A good leader can take an organization or team and accomplish things that no one thought was possible. In order to do this, a leader must make incremental changes that are challenging, but not impossible. By giving their organization a series of successes, they will build momentum that will help them overcome even more difficult obstacles in the future.

There is an occupation that is particularly good at doing this with the people they lead–teachers. Good teachers take their students far beyond what the students think is possible in a short period of time.

To accomplish this, teachers break the overall semester goals into smaller weekly goals and arrange them in a logical order. One of the things that sets truly talented teachers apart from others is their ability to arrange study topics and assignments in the sequence that is most suitable for learning.

The best teachers I have had plan their assignments out for the entire semester and include it as part of the syllabus. Going into the class, you look at the assignments and it is overwhelming, but the first one looks doable, challenging and interesting. In the process of completing the first assignment, you learn several things that make the next assignment a little more doable and so on. By the time you’ve completed 3 or 4 assignments, you have momentum and confidence. The confidence isn’t in how smart you are, but it is more of a trust in the teacher that if he gives you an assignment, it is something that you can complete.

A leader must take the same approach as a teacher when it comes to improving his organization. They must present a picture of where they are going that is challenging and beyond what their team thinks they can achieve. They must present a plan broken down into individual goals and the first one must be challenging, but within what everyone thinks is possible.

The difficulty for most leaders is the fact that many don’t have enough experience with their organization or as a leader to know what is possible and what is not. They also don’t have the experience to know how much obtaining a particular goal will increase the skill of their team. This makes it difficult to create a series of goals where, every time you achieve one, you are more equipped to achieve the next.

Professors have the advantage of being able to teach the same class year after year. Some of the best classes I’ve taken were by professors who have been teaching the same class with the same assignments for the past 20 or 30 years. Since teachers get a new class each semester, they have the chance to start fresh. Any miscalculations about the difficulty of certain assignments can be changed the next semester and any discouragement on the part of the students is not cumulative. They will start with fresh students next year.

If you are leading an organization, you don’t have many of these luxuries. One miscalculation can discourage your team and instead of catapulting them to a new level, can actually reduce what they are capable of accomplishing. To manage these risks, a leader must approach their first goals very carefully.

It is wise to start with small changes first. This helps build momentum and gives the leader a better idea of what his people are capable of accomplishing. By making the goals informal, a leader can learn these things while reducing the risk of creating discouragement.

Over time, a leader must articulate formal goals and plans. Some leaders don’t want to tell anyone what the organizational goals are because they don’t want people to get discouraged if they aren’t achieved. While this might be beneficial for a short period of time, if a leader is unable to share goals and plans after a year, it will be detrimental to the organization.

Teamwork can only flourish when there are clear goals. Without clear goals, everyone will default to doing whatever is best for themselves. This creates a political environment.

Popular leadership books make a big deal out of saying that anyone can be a leader. United States’ culture places a heavy emphasis on everyone being equal, so I understand why this idea is so popular in America.

I was reading Politics by Aristotle the other day and it struck me how different his view of leadership was from our modern ideas. Aristotle felt that people were more or less born as a barbarian (someone not fit to lead) or a noble (someone fit to lead). While his views might seem extreme in our modern view of things, there may be some benefit in that type of approach.

If we recognize that some people are leaders and others aren’t, we’ll spend less time trying to develop leadership skill in people who have no natural propensity to lead. One of the great failures that technology companies are working to overcome is the tendency to pay more for leadership skills than for technical skills. Many very productive scientists and technical people get moved to management positions because it is viewed as a promotion.

Some do well, but others find themselves poorly equipped for their new responsibilities. They are basically taken out of the area where they perform well and are highly skilled and put into an area where they don’t perform well and have no skills. Technical companies are responding to this crisis by creating parallel development paths for employees—one path is technical and the other path is management. Someone who is not a leader can continue to advance throughout their career without requiring them to shift to management.

I do believe that leadership skills can be taught, but I don’t believe that it is necessarily beneficial to everyone. If you’ve ever seen an eagle try to run, you’ll know that it isn’t something they are good at. Since they don’t do it much, they aren’t quite balanced and usually compensate by sticking out their wings.

One point of view would be to look at the eagle and decide that, with a little training, he can become a better runner. With a little practice, the eagle should be able to keep his wings at his side and balance more naturally while running. I’m not sure how much work it would take, but with persistence you could at least make some improvement.

The other point of view would be to make sure eagles aren’t put into situations where they are required to run. Even if you could train them to be twice as good at running, that really isn’t much improvement. Your organization will gain much more by putting them in areas where they can be successful with the skills they have.

Management skills are a subset of leadership skills. I’ve often heard people try to separate them by saying that they are leaders, but not managers. In my experience, the people who say this are generally failures when it comes to attracting followers, which makes it difficult to consider them successful leaders.

A leader is someone who knows where to go. Management skills are how they actually get there. A college student who gets a bunch of friends together to take a weekend trip skiing is acting not only as a leader, but also as a manager. The student must take into account how much gas they have in their car, how much lift tickets are going to cost, invite people who have a reasonable chance of getting along with each other, etc.

Someone who is trying to act as a leader, but wants nothing to do with management, is like a 7 year old who has found the keys to the family car and is overcome with the desire to drive to Disney World. Vision, a goal, and a sense of purpose are all present, but the ability to plan and execute is lacking.

I once worked for someone who wanted to lead, but not manage. They tried to explain this by saying that they were “a visionary”. I suppose that they meant they came up with the ideas and other people executed them, but a quick trip to the dictionary revealed:

visionary – noun. One whose ideas or projects are impractical.

That is a pretty good description of someone who wants to lead, but not manage. They may have wonderful ideas, but without the ability to plan and oversee the necessary work, their ideas are not going to be realized–at least not by them. If their ideas are implemented, it will be done by another leader who embraces the management function.

While management is an important part of leadership, the reverse is not necessarily true. There are many people who are very skilled at implementing someone else’s vision who are not leaders. The fact that these people exist can make some leaders feel justified in abdicating their responsibility to manage.

In its simplest form, management is the process of defining and measuring success. (See these management quotes for other perspectives on management.) The leader who attempts to pass these responsibilities off to a different individual is unlikely to achieve 100% alignment between their vision and the actual work done by the organization. This doesn’t mean that the organization will necessarily be ineffective, but if only 80% of the work being done is actually aligned with the vision, there is going to be a decrease in productivity overall.

A leader who sets the vision, defines success, and determines the measurements of success will be more effective than the same leader who wants to set the vision, but refuses to undertake any work in the management area.