How to Foster Leadership in Management
Management vs Leadership
Management is a set of practices, process, workflows, and skills to maintain organization within a company. Its importance scales with the size of the company to keep the operational order.
Leadership, on the other hand, is not a personality trait, but a learnable skillset. It provides team and company with the vision and direction to deal with changes, both internally and externally. A great leadership becomes essential in the competitive, volatile business environment. And such directions serve as a backbone to execute effective management.
Leadership without management is like a rowing team with a clear destination but no paddles to move forward. On the other hand, management without leadership is like a world-class rowing team adrift in the vast ocean, moving fast towards no clear destination or purpose.
Planning vs Direction Setting
Sometimes companies fall into a trap of long-term planning, which sets a solid plan which is less adaptable to changes. This shows over-management and lack of leadership in the system. Leadership plays a role in defining the vision for the future and set the strategy and direction for management to perform planning over and resolve problems. Strong leaderships also means going back and reiterate over the set directions to accommodate the ever-changing environment. Over-managed companies lacking direction will rigidly stick to the long-term planning, struggling to adapt to changes. Companies with vision treat planning as adaptable means to achieve the set direction and goal, which can change over new trends and observations.
Company executives should communicate direction and vision to all people involved, and "align" then via the communication channels. Top-level people are responsible for talking with all involved stakeholders and align the vision and directions such that everyone has a sense of ownership in the company and are willing to take risks and adapt to new changes as all are aligned with the vision. This creates an environment where even the lowest-level employees can feel safe to initiate change within the teams or organization, without facing reprimands from the upper management since the visions are aligned.
Leadership is about Motivation.
Leadership inspires and motivates people towards shared vision and directions by appealing to the basic human needs; achievement, recognition, belonging, and self-esteem--fueling the motivation to sustain the perseverance to pursue the goal and overcome challenges, while management guides and controls the process to achieve the vision.
What Companies Can Do to Create a Culture of Leaderships
Seek out potential and develop career plan
Companies should be looking for people and talents with leadership potential and support them in the early careers by giving them experiences to lead, including challenging tasks such as risk-taking and retrospectives. It is also crucial to equip them with the management principles such that they can lead effectively, and to broaden the exposure by assigning different tasks.
Supporting by giving them chances to lead will make the candidates visible to the senior management and allow them to help coach the new leaders on what needs to be improved.
Rewards leadership initiatives.
A company culture rewarding leaderships incentivizes employees to lead changes, take risks, and drive innovation. Examples are adding the "new" initiatives into the KPI where employees entrepreneurship is counted towards performance
Improve informal network
Informal relationships and networks are essential to initiate and navigate changes. Company with a lot of informal relationship between teams and departments improve trusts between the teams and encourage cross-department collaboration which can give a completely new solution to existing problems. Trusts created by these networks are crucial in leadership culture since friction and conflicts often arise among roles, and those informal network and relationships serves as a secondary channel to support more communication and help align leadership roles, which ultimately resolves conflicts, reduce strains in the formal channels, and help navigate through changes smoothly.
