Archive for the ‘Leadership’ Category
Using Your People to Help Make Decisions
Get your people involved
Good management practice is to get your people involved. Use them to help make decisions. This makes a lot of sense. It is impossible to know everything about all things. Use their expertise, get their input.
Don’t be a politician
The problem today is there is also the tendency for managers to be to be very political. Managers ask for input when they have already made decisions to give illusion that they are interested in what their employees have to say. People are not stupid, they will figure out you are only talking to them as window dressing. What this leads to is people not really investing when you really want their input and simply dissatisfied employees.
Leadership is knowing when to ask
Leadership is understanding when to ask employees their input and when to just make the decision. When you have a new group, that does not have the experience needed to give the needed input, then by all means make the call. If time dictates a decision must be made now, then by all means make the decision.
Tell employees about decision
The key when making decisions, without input, is to then quickly get back to your employees and let them know what is going on. The worst thing that can happen is your employees get information, about the decision, second hand. The information may be incomplete or false, leading to bad decisions by employees. When there is no information people will fill the vacuum with their own information. Made up information almost always creates an even bigger problem. If you find you are always making the decision, then you need to reevaluate how you make decisions, because it means your planning process is flawed.
Don’t abdicate the decision
Once you have asked your team their input, remember you are still the boss and it is your decision. Do not abdicate just because your people do not agree with your position. Just make sure to let people know you heard what they had to say, repeat what they are telling you. Then tell them you appreciate their input, but this time you do not agree. However, if you are always overruling your team, my guess is you are not really listening and you are really a politician.
Without Steve Jobs does Apple need a mission statement?
It may be hard to believe that a company, as successful as Apple, does not have a published mission statement. You will never see a book on business planning that does not start out talking about how to be a successful a company must have a mission that is concise and easily understood by its employees. A well thought out mission statement helps execute the business on a daily basis. The usual example is where would the railroads be today if they realized they were in the “transportation” business not the railroad business.
Steve Jobs did not have a formal mission statement at Apple. Steve Jobs was an unusual individual that had an uncanny sense of what the market wanted. He did not believe in focus groups or surveys because he thought the consumer didn’t know what he or she wanted. It was up to Apple to tell them what they wanted. Most businesses lack Steve Jobs’ clarity of vision.
Since Steve Jobs was able to set himself up as the ultimate arbiter of what went on at Apple it didn’t matter that the rest of his organization had a written mission. It would be interesting to see where Apple would be if Steve Jobs had stayed with Next.
Without Steve Jobs, Apple will need a defined mission. It is unlikely that there will be a single individual that will be able to gather and hold the power over the organization the way Steve Jobs did over Apple. Steve Jobs acted his entire career at Apple as the entrepreneur does when he starts a business. The entrepreneur has a single vision of where the company must go to succeed. Steve Jobs had an uncanny sense to see where the personal computing world was going.
Management By Wandering Around (MBWA)
Is the idea of management by wandering around (MBWA), first presented in 1982 by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman in their book, In Search of Excellence, still a valid concept? Today we have so much more data and information at our fingertips through internal and external sources. Can we find everything we need right at our desks? Yes, you can find the baseline information. But no, you cannot make the best decisions for the organization. Without real world experiential data you lack the information necessary to get the real texture of what is going on in the business.
Without texture or context you have only half the answer. It is like trying to make a decision on buying a car without seeing it. You know it will take you down the highway, but will you be comfortable with the trip.
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Leadership?
What is leadership? If you go to Dictionary.com and look at the definition of leadership you recognize very quickly that to understand what leadership is you must understand what it means to lead. Dictionary.com takes a combined fifty stabs at defining lead as a verb and noun. To list a few as a verb it defines lead as to go before or with to show the way; to conduct by holding and guiding; to influence or induce; to guide in direction, course, action, opinion, etc.; to command or direct. As a noun lead means the first or foremost place; position in advance of others; a person or thing that leads.
What does it mean to be a leader?
In simple terms, to define what it means to lead, we could use the old Calvin Coolidge adage, “The buck stops here.” The key is not just understanding what it takes to lead, but how it is accomplished. It means sometimes leaders are going to make decisions that are not popular. For example, today, if we look into politics, leadership is starting to mean do what the latest poles show us. Maybe in a political sense this is okay because politicians are supposed to be representing the people. However, this assumes that a pole will show what is better for the greater good rather than the poled population.