Friday, January 16, 2009

Beyond Leadership and Management

Second of a series of three: Leadership Vs. Management, Beyond Leadership and Management, and Leadership and Management are just the Tip...

Based on feedback from the first post in this series, Leadership v Management, I have decided to not have separate level-titles. I will now refer to the "responsible-person" at every level as the "Chief."

In the first post in this series, I described the component skills of the leadership and management groups. Though the skills of leadership and management are necessary at all levels, they are not sufficient beyond the team level. As the organization or environment becomes more complex, the chief needs additional skills.


At the Organization level, the chief needs skills in the additional groups of "Goals" and "Teamwork." As chiefs become responsible for more complexity, their component teams must be self-leading and self-managing. However, the chief is responsible to ensure they work together towards common goals.


Skill

Measurement

ManagementEfficiency
LeadershipEffort
TeamworkEase

GoalsEffect

The key indicator that group is at the organization level is that the Chief does not have direct managerial or leadership influence over all the people. As a rule of thumb this would normally be a third line chief. That works for a large company, but in a smaller company, these skills may be needed at a lower level.

There is a more precise way to determine this. When chiefs give directions to their component teams, they make judgments on who gets to do what based on the component team's capabilities. As the chief measures these capabilities, the critical question is, "are they considering each person in their component teams?" If there are too many people so they only can consider the component team's capabilities, then they are at this level.

Thanks to Mike Kilbane for the primary motivation for dumping the level-title of "Supervisor." I also updated the previous post to accommodate this change.

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