Are You A Manager Or A Leader?
Give people access to your resource fund, maintaining under control the excess of demand and offer.
The manager of a company was confronted a long time ago with a major difficulty. He had to solve the situation in a very short time. Nevertheless, instead of encouraging the employees to join their forces in order to solve the problem, he gave them an ultimatum:
"Each of those who still want to stay in this company has to come up with a unique idea to solve the problem in 24 hours. The one, who is not capable of finding a good solution in this time, will be fired without any explanation."
In the end, the problem was not solved, and the company got bankrupt after the manager fired almost all his employees.
Do you argue the influence of your position from the perspective of an absolute determination of the level of competence, given the existence of a cause that removes the justified nature of your deeds?
In football, it can be said that a teammate "take part in the game" when it influences the game anyway, even through words and gestures, preventing the opponent or attempting to obtain an advantage from his offside position.
In a company, just like in football, every employee who provides, seriously his shoulder to its development, is part of a game of great complexity, but also can be of high risk, in which he must keep his trust and credibility in front of the employer and other colleagues, may gaining an advantage only through his favorable results, that confirm his commitment and helps him be valuable.
How do you take part in the game? By using your skills and competences in your company’s favor, or in its disadvantage? Through an acceleration of your productivity growth, or through a decrease of your level of involvement?
The only guarantee of your vision is how you maintain your balance when all the surrounding context becomes transient.
Just as a plant should be watered daily, so do you should maintain constantly the series of professional victories so that your leadership to maintain and increase its effectiveness.
The justified nature of a deed or behavior in the imminent circumstances of a profoundly critical position on the performance and strategy of a company is not only given by a man’s line of conduct but by the discernment and morality with which he faces perceptions, norms and social prejudices.
The only reason that removes the justified nature of your actions is the decision to revoke an act of free choice expressed by the old saying: man is the master of no one.
Reputation is built when you maintain a constant balance between access and control, taking responsibility for identifying and applying constructive approaches.
Leadership is a form of power that can be accepted or imposed. To follow someone because you have no choice, because you are forced to do it, is not exactly the best choice. A good leader is the one who has the ability to motivate people to act and work with them as effectively as possible by maintaining a permanent connection of "access-control". Meaning people must have access to his resource fund, and he must have access to theirs – maintaining under control the excess of demand and offer.
Not being able to locate an action of perceiving a constructive approach is like sailing a boat: you cannot load it with everything you can find and take it out to sea, as long as it sinks because of its own weight.
I'll add something here. A constructive approach aims at the impetus to make those transformations you want in the company without continuing your activities through a "Command Error" message. Such an approach captures the idea of a change that does not load with a greater burden than when you initiated it.
The effectiveness of power is directly proportional to the speed of integration of the lessons of reality and collapses at the point where the desire for immediate justice outweighs the need to maintain unity.
There is no secret that a person can reach a high position of leadership, but that does not automatically mean that he has leadership skills. The manager is always firm and rarely offers open-heartedly, often showing rigidity in thought and action. While the leader is always open to collaboration, to change his mentality, to understand, is open to be corrected when necessary, open to an exchange of ideas and experience even with his inferiors.
Leading does not mean that the leader commands and others execute his orders through obedience and fear. Leading means training and mobilizing people by achieving a common goal, through a malleable process of optimizing their performance.
Leadership: Can you give meaning to your role by encouraging finding new ways of doing things, even in a "you versus others" context?
It is true that you cannot be a leader if you are not an ambitious person, tenacious, persistent, perceptive, competent, and prepared to face the challenges which intervene in your professional life. However, if you do not know how to attract people by your side, if you are not capable of doing more for them, to be by their side and to support them when everything seems lost, then you will end alone.
People are not equal. They have skills, knowledge and different qualities. This is what a manager should consider before asking his employees to fulfill some extremely difficult tasks. Moreover, in a critical situation, teamwork has a major importance, so if a manager appeal at a method to determine people to work individually, he only makes them go away, which inevitably leads to failure.
No wonder that only few companies resist for a long time on the market and that is because not all of them are led by truly competent leaders, but by managers without a profitable culture of leadership.
Only what you have better in you, can add value to others, can raise them or can make them come down.
Management is the demand for efficiency that you generate to get more quality, strength and notoriety. While Leadership is a motivated offer to achieve high performance without being dependent on the demands of a return that does not justify an investment in people’s lives.
