Leader, Manager, Servant?
- Details
- Category: Organisation
- Created on 16 December 2009
- Written by Steve Burrows
As published in Isle of Man Newspapers an article about leadership, developing leadership in management, and the role of Servant Leadership.
One of the enduring problems in business is that of promoting employees into "management" positions. Good workers expect to be recognised, rewarded, and progress up the rungs of the ladder in return for their commitment and contribution to the organisation. One day, if they're lucky, the next rung of the ladder is a management position in which they will be responsible for other workers who execute business process instead of doing all the grunt work themselves. Often we promote people who have delivered exceptional results as workers into the coveted management role, only to see them inexplicably fail.
The job of a worker is to execute business process, selling, making, delivering, accounting etc. Most business process is a repetitive and formulaic cycle which can be predicted, documented, executed and measured. Hopefully the worker, over time, learns the full repertoire of business processes within his or her orbit, and the related measurements. When we promote them to become a manager they know the business processes that their staff must undertake, and they understand the measurements, albeit perhaps not their significance. So they are equipped to train, supervise and measure the processes performed by their staff, and that is what they do. All well and good so far.
But this is where the problem starts. We manage and measure process, but rarely do we manage and measure progress to objective and outcome. As business leaders we have vision; if we can do A, B, and C we will get to Z, the outcome we desire. Nobody sets up a business to execute a process. Process is merely a necessary set of steps in achieving an outcome, yet we often fail to communicate the desired outcome to our managers and staff, or measure their progress towards it. In some cases this may be reticence, our desired outcome is often quite venal (what are we in business for?), in others it is simply an absence of communication, allowing us to believe that our managers and staff share our objective of the desired outcome whilst they in ignorance believe their function is to execute the process. The scale of the problem grows with the organisation, as our business develops and we take on more staff we touch each of them less, depend on our managers more, allowing the vision of our desired outcome to become diluted. For the staff on the ground, the process becomes the dominant measure of their work.
To overcome this we as business leaders must lead our managers, enable them to share the vision of the outcome, and help them to measure their progress towards achieving it. We must also assist, enable and empower them to lead their staff likewise.
In my experience this is where the transition from "worker" to "manager" so often fails. In promoting our employees to management positions we omit to develop within them the leadership skills necessary to be an effective manager; perhaps we assume that they were born with leadership, or maybe we fail to recognise that management is a leadership role. Whatever the reasons, the result is managers who manage process instead of leading their staff closer to the desired outcome. If we fail to enable, engage and lead our managers towards our visions and desired outcomes they will fail as managers, either through not providing leadership, or by leading their staff towards their own visions instead of ours. We cannot assume that those we appoint as managers will be natural leaders, we must coach and develop them to enhance their leadership abilities, share with them our visions and the outcomes we seek, and we must measure them on their contributions to those outcomes, not simply on the execution of process by the staff they manage.
So where does the servant fit in? One of the key functions of leadership is to enable; we don't merely tell people what to do, we assist them, coach them, help them overcome the barriers they face in achieving our desired outcomes. Part of the role of the leader is to be a servant, to not only possess and communicate vision, but to actively assist people in achieving that vision - The leader must serve his people in order that they may follow. The concept of the leader as a servant of his people is natural to great leaders, but its documented expression as a leadership philosophy is relatively recent, with the publication of "The Servant as Leader" by Robert Greenleaf in 1970.
In coaching and developing our managers to become leaders we need to teach them concepts that may seem counter-intuitive; managers new to leadership generally perceive it as a position of command, and the idea of the leader as a servant will not occur without help. The role of a manager as a leader is the epitome of Servant Leadership, requiring the manager to develop, empower, assist and support his staff in the course of managing their activities and leading them towards our desired outcomes.
