Management has been around for more than a century, and it has worked well in terms of increasing economic efficiency and productivity. But, in the face of rapid change, the world needs more than management to successfully get through this next stage of unprecedented transformation. Our world needs more leaders.
When the world changes, management always fails because we don’t understand how to go forward. Leadership and management are entirely different things. Top-down management arose from the era of Henry Ford and scientific management, where companies and governments created value by getting employees and people to do the same tasks repeatedly. The world is changing and, we are not going to be able to manage our way out of it. We are going to have to lead. And leadership is not the same as management.
People must understand that managers need authority, but leaders take responsibility. To put it another way: managers tell people what to do and expect them to do it, while leaders inspire people to follow them of their own free will. Leadership means solving interesting problems, even if they are not on your agenda. Managers are slaves to their agenda, and rarely understand the cultural proficiency of their people.
We have ended up with management-heavy and leadership-poor societal and business environments is because current education systems were not designed to teach people how to be leaders. The school has been a product of industrialization, formed around the need to prepare students to become compliant factory workers. We don’t educate people. We don’t teach them to solve interesting problems. We don’t teach them to lead and as s a result, people developed a fear of failure.
Striving for excellence
The next big misunderstanding has to do with quality. At first thought, we might consider quality as something expensive, fancy, or high-class. But what quality really means is “meeting spec”, living up to expectations, and simply “doing what it is supposed to do”. This is where lean management systems are rooted; quality control at the production line of the Japanese carmaker Toyota, for example, is designed to ensure that the company meets the specs. According to we have already solved the quality problem. We know how to produce well-functioning products at scale that meet the specifications; we should be striving for excellence. Producing something truly great is the only way to build a competitive advantage because sophisticated robots, artificial intelligence, and low-paid labor will handle the trivial job of meeting spec and assure quality.
The next big idea is about skills or what many call “soft skills” – things like loyalty, creativity, and trustworthiness. These “soft skills” should be called “real skills” because these are the characteristics that differentiate a potential employee from a robot. Presenting a lengthy list of desirable traits, are skills or attitudes?
It turns out most of them are attitudes because you can just decide which makes them a skill because it can be taught. So, if you don’t have to be a born leader, why is it so difficult to become one? Because you must decide; you must put in the effort to learn these skills. The fundamental skill of good leaders is critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creativity, and civic responsibilities. In addition, positive decision-making is essential. Should not be for self-interest, but for the positive change of the organization and for local/national interests.
We need to learn how to get better at making actual good decisions and not getting hung up on the idea that the outcome is the point, the outcome is continuous and beyond all tomorrows. There is a big difference between choices and decisions. Choices don’t really matter. Vanilla or chocolate? What it means is that when you come to a fork in the road, one thing is clear; you should just take it and not get too hung up on making the choice. It is the decisions about investing our time, money, effort, and trust that matter. Quality effective leaders should spend not spend their time on the choice— but some leaders are ignoring those decisions because they are too busy choosing who to follow on Facebook.
The next big idea is that quitting is for winners. According, there are two times to quit and one time when you should never quit. Leaders should never quit in the dip meaning the period after beginning a project when things suddenly become hard, and the excitement starts to wane. The leader should either quit before they start or quit at the end because they have made it through the dip, and it wasn’t worth it. Refocusing on the idea of transformational change, if failure is not an option, then neither is a success. In this experience, effective quality leadership can help companies and governments navigate this slippery slope. What effective leaders do is find processes, what managers do is find roads. And if we can see in our thoughts that something is possible, all of us can become responsible for the decisions to achieve our desired results. Once we have become responsible, we can build a process.
Leading the next generation
What is the job of an organizational leader? It is to connect and challenge people, to build a culture, and to communicate. Ultimately, it is about taking the world in the right direction. Given what you’ve got, the connection to so many people, the trust, the resources, the fact that there’s a roof over your head and there’s a safety net… Given that you’ve got that and there’s this generation coming after us, what are you going to do for them? Where are you going to take them?
The power of any movement lies in the fact that it can indeed change the habits of people. This change is not the result of force but of dedication, of moral persuasion, Ethical Behavior, and Political Respect and Equity; REAL-Respect Equity and Leadership.
Dr. Paul A. Rodriguez
