2 Responses

1. Leadership & Management: the biggest challenge
   Although they’re often delivered as opposite sides of the same coin, getting staff to acknowledge the difference in different contexts may be the key to success in both leadership and management.

   Some people can do both very successfully while some successful leaders make poor managers, relying on their leadership of excellent managers. Conversely, some of those very excellent managers may only be able to lead at the level of their own teams, rather than more strategically.

   The literature is full of some surprising examples of this, the most quoted one being Churchill, whose leadership outcomes are well documented, but whose management skills have been portayed as inadequate.

2. “Hands off”
   I vividly remember the Monday morning that I walked into the office and recognised that not only did I not know what my people were doing, but I probably could not. This recognition was SO liberating, enabling me to concentrate on the more strategic aspects of both management and leadership instead of micro-managing.

   For me, as both a practising leader/manager (and is it not the case that most of us are both simultaneously?) it is recognising when to intervene and when to be ‘hands off’.
   Managers tend to want to get their hands dirty, when the best management ‘intervention’ they might make would be to get out of their employees’ way.
   Leaders often fail to recognise that the led need help on their difficult journey and stay too ‘hands off’ when they might usefully muck in and empathise with those struggling to follow.