Leadership & Management are not the same thing

Due to my new found time to read and reflect on my daily commute from the CBD to and from my home, some 1 hours travel in a comfy V/Line train, I’ve found I’ve been able to catch up on piles of reading, that in all seriousness, has lapsed for years. Part of this, I’ve read a series of leadership and management books. Always illuminating, the below are some take homes I’ve articulated myself and come to the conclusion too, based on my experience over the years.

Leadership: Offers inspiration, vision, the structure that paves the direction which galvanizes people to follow and participate in the strategic vision.

Management: is the binding force whether activity, personality, measurement or which offers advice, support, guidance, discipline and assessment of quality/output and outcomes, in line with the strategic vision.

Good leaders have:

• Oratorical Communication Skills, excellent public speakers and confidence in speaking
• A distinctive (and hopefully aspirational) personal presence. This is a combination of grooming, body stance, dress style.
• Engagement – the very best leaders engage at a 1 to 1 level with key staff.
• An outlook of always offering encouragement.
• Never show negative emotions, contempt, disdain, doubt or anger. The energies that drive these are rechanneled into asking succinct questions to key staff and clients which are based on receiving direct, factual answers and then allowing them to afford insight and draw the strategic goals together.
• Rewarding – fiercely loyal to those who show loyalty to them and very obviously so, so that other people in the organisation can see the benefits of success and commitment.
• Consistent – being consistent is more critical and sustainable than having flashes of brilliance or success, as people learn to gravitate towards the measured pace of success and positive gain during the tough times.

Bad leaders are:

• Distrustful. Those that are distrustful in a public sense – people can sense that they are so – it doesn’t engender much trust to follow someone you know doesn’t trust you. It is very different in terms of people’s expectations that they expect to be distrusted. In the past for myself if people were nervous around me, it was their own standards (mediocre to high) which they were valuing themselves, not anything I had overtly said. Any actual comparison of standards was left in the area of performance and criteria matching for an expectation.
• Disorganized. Being disorganized as a leader sets the example to all that follow you that that is an acceptable standard of performance and therefore shelter within the standard set. At least give the appearance of being organized. This extends to every aspect of your being at work – behavior, appearance, desk, communications, follow up
• Inconsistent. Unfortunately the nature of being a leader means you are going to have people taking pot shots at you regardless of how good/bad you are. Being inconsistent only validates their viewpoint with the more positive and accepting types around you who rely on your equinaminous nature to endure the tough times.

Good managers have

• Patience; a mentoring outlook, a practiced, methodical manner in handling situations, whether mundane or under high stress. Because of this persona, they are inherently stable and staff build up a level of trust in them to discuss things which are outside of their comfort zone.
• Knowledge; understanding and clarity on what the staff they managing are doing at any point. This is NOT micro management, but rather regularly, scheduled reviews (daily, weekly) of activity and gaps.
• Ownership; key traits in successful managers I’ve always sought is a sense of responsibility as if the tasks, activities or projects were their own.
• Honest with their colleagues and themselves. An outstanding manager is one who knows they don’t necessarily have the “big picture” but trust those that do – the good leader.

Bad managers are:

• Same traits as a bad leader, but in addition:
• Unethical. This is an interesting one – an unethical manager is one who in the simplest sense, will blame and bury those around them, and entrap them with their role and seniority. At its most sophisticated, they lie, when they can’t be proven wrong nor found out and do so to suit their own selfish needs and career advancement.
• Amoral. In one sense, this is tougher to deal with than even an unethical manager. At least you can see this and they get a reputation for such and in the unfortunate circumstance you are saddled with a manager like this, you can at least watch your back. Their lack of insight and inherent understanding of what is right begets scenarios which because their wasn’t a clear path forward, from a moral perspective, they chart the course which is a means to an end, irrespective of the morality of the journey. The goal is the only thing that matters, and they cannot see that there is anything wrong with what they ordered/enacted/endorsed to meet this goal.

Business Contacts vs Personal Contacts

I caught up for lunch with a former work colleague last week and they posed this question:

“How do I manage personal contacts vs business contacts, specifically when one becomes the other?”

I was instantly reminded of an answer that I gave on LinkedIn a few years back (May 29th 2008 to be precise) to this very question. I got the added bonus it was voted the “Best Answer”

How do you manage your Business and Personal contacts?
For example, what software or online database do you use?
Do you merge business and personal contacts or keep the separate?
Sometimes business and personal contacts are one in the same, how
do you handle that?

My response was:

If money is passing hands and that’s how the relationship started, they are Business, irrespective if they get invited to a personal BBQ, a golf day with friends or a weekend at the snow with the family.I treat both work related and personal business contacts ie: the electrician for my house as Business contacts.

To differentiate, I append a note as to where I met them eg: Work or via a mutual acquaintance and the date I met them – “First Contact”. I always name the work place, so that as I change jobs, I build up a history and can search for them as needed.

If they are friends from my personal life read: school, university, hockey, adventure racing whatever, than they are Personal. If money is transacted, they stay friends, with a secondary note outlining the preliminary contact.

Outlook is capable of tracking all this. For online, if the contacts management is just for yourself, consider sites like HighriseHQ http://www.highrisehq.com or Zoho http://crm.zoho.com/crm/login.sas. For a sales environment, where you are tracking your sales teams and need to assign ‘accounts’ and track client interactivity, you need something a bit more battle ready, check out SugarCRM, Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics. Each has its pluses and minuses, not least of all cost and complexity.The better CRM’s can sync with your Outlook Contacts & Email, export to a readily readible format like CSV (comma separated values) and manage complex relationships eg: multiple contacts within the same business, cross contacts, hierarchal relationships and allow data mining of your inputted data to identify sales or product/service trends.

Going to the next level, the CRM will integrate to your HR Payroll, ERP, Invoicing and capture web data from your corporate website. Additionally, good CRM’s can be keyed into a 3rd party analytics package (think: Google Analytics, Nielsen NetRatings, Omniture etc) to track user activity across your web site and customer Extranets – you can start predicting trends and unearthing opportunities for your teams. Smart companies are using CRM systems tied into their e-Newsletter environments to deliver custom tailored news content into end users mailboxes – and tracking their click through rates, reading patterns and user behaviour. I use a Blackberry, synced to Outlook, which is in turn synced with two CRM’s – HighriseHQ for personal and SugarCRM for work. I’ve used Act!, SalesForce, SalesLogix and Goldmine too in this fashion.

A final point – if you are deploying a CRM for your sales team, pay someone to implement it for you – their experience in avoiding the pitfalls will be invaluable. Nothing worse than shelling out $$$ for a system no one can use because it’s not setup correctly.

After my diatribe to said friend, we sunk a few more glasses of red to compensate for talking work in our off time. Was a good lunch.

My view on Tech People

I was having dinner a few days ago with a very good friend of mine who I’ve known for more than 20 years (eeeekkkk!!! revealing my age here) who was bemoaning the fact that he is finding it difficult to find quality staff to work with in his respective patch at one of the Evil Empires (insert one of the Telstra, Sensis, IBM or Accenture type of business and you get the idea)

I’m the first to confess that I’m not really, that technical in my view of the world, as defined by some of the super smart people I have worked with over my career. I’ve got technical understanding and I can support that with the evidence that I know how much I don’t know and know when to get out of the way. In that regard however I’m definitely a geek, who is into gadgets, but not the full blown cartoon level propeller head. I’d like to think I get along with developers in general terms, indeed, I find much of interest in their outlook and approach to doing things, but I don’t profess to understand the minutiae with which drives their day to day to be entertaining, rewarding and satisfying. I’m more interested in the outcomes they influence and how it can meet the commercial goals of the business that we’re working with.

The crux of his discussion was that he manages a number of managers, who in turn have platoons of dev’s reporting into his group and he had realised that over the years he had lost touch with what it was that devs ought to have as a core skill set, characteristics and aspirations in “stepping up” particularly in relation to their pay grade. It reminded me of an email I drilled up a little while back with some colleagues, trying to quantify this very viewpoint into something that was a little more tangible, so that of all small things, I could author a position description and send it to a recruiter for some staff we were looking for. Upon reading it again, I still stick by the below. I’ve found that over the years, it has given me a framework with how I manage people and more importantly interact with them in a meaningful way.

Staff Member Role Responsiblities, Obligations & Expectations

Company Values

1. Profitability & Sustainability – our ability to earn money, in a long term and effective manner

2. Quality – as defined by our work being judged and validated by our competitors and partners as being the best

3. Success – as defined by the feedback we elicit from our clients which is positive

Supporting the above

1. Adaptive – our ability as people to learn from our mistakes to improve and deliver on the above

100 books in a year

Working in Digital, I fall prey to being a little bit jaded at times with the sheer volume of information I’m forced to process on a day to day basis. I’m old enough to still remember with some fondness my teenage years devouring books from cover to cover on a Sunday afternoon curled up in some quiet corner of the house or in my 20′s sitting in some hip cafe in Fitzroy or Brunswick with a string of Latte’s and a ripping good yarn keeping me entertained. I think the height of my nerdiness, would have been in year 8, when I read, for 52 weeks straight, one Dr Who novel per week. It definitely included the entire novelisation of the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker TV series Doctor’s – Time Lords #3 & #4 respectively. I don’t recall wearing cravats and floppy hats with coloured scarves, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a photo could be reproduced showing such.

These days, much of my reading consumption is restricted to the screen of my computer or my Android tablet.

Recently on Twitter, I came across a post which led me to find the profile of Claire Diaz Ortiz.

Having a look at her background, what intrigued me is that she has set herself the personal goal of reading 100 books each year and lists them on her website “What I’m Reading.” http://clairediazortiz.com/about/what-im-reading

That simple statement of personal achievement, self awareness and endeavour got me to thinking that this is one of the first inspirational personal journeys I’d seen for a long time. Selfish in its simplicity, it speaks so much more about the type of world we live in where we consume information in short sharp bites and in a stop/start fashion where everything is reduced down to terse, emotionless sentences and streams of fact and data. And it’s not like she isn’t a busy person – she works at Twitter as the lead of Social Innovation & Philanthropy. In her own words:

Claire Diaz Ortiz (Williams) http://www.twitter.com/ClaireD”

I lead social innovation and philanthropy at Twitter & wrote Twitter for Good (out 8/11) Me: MBA, Stanford/Oxford Grad, Skoll Fdn Fellow, Hope Runs founder

Man, she would be an interesting person to meet!

Taking a cue from Claire’s idea, The below are the books that I have read in the past 12 months. No where near 100, I was still pleased with the number I got considering that I thought I would only have read half of these.

1. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2. The On demand Brand – Rick Mathieson
3. The Perfect Mess – The benefits of disorder and chaos in our workplace
4. Enders Game – Orson Scott Card
5. The Dreaming Void – Peter F Hamilton
6. The Dangerous Book for Boys – Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden
7. Facebook Story – Sarah Lacy
8. A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder – How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices,
and on-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place by Eric Abrahamson, David H.Freedman.
9. The Truth about Leadership: The No-fads, Heart-of-the-Matter Facts You Need to Know by James M. Kouzes, Barry Z. Posner
10. Chronicles of the Black Company by Glen Cook
11. InterGalactic Medicine Show (v. 1) – Orson Scott Card
12. Matter – Iain Banks
13. Surface Detail – Iain Banks
14. 1001 Video Games you have to play before you die. – more of a skimming book, where I’ve jumped back and forth between entries. I think I’ve read about half of it.
15. 1001 Holiday destinations you have to visit before you die – likewise, more of a skimming book, I’ve read about 30% of it.
16. Media Virus – Douglas Rishkoff
17. The Sword of the Lamb
18. Shadow of the Swan – M.K Wren
19. House of the Wolf – M.K Wren
20. Absolution Gap – Alastair Reynolds
21. Revelation Space – Alastair Reynolds
22. Buyology: How Everything We Believe about Why We Buy Is Wrong : Martin Lindstrom
23. Man in the High Castle – Phillip K Dick