The First Lesson in Smart Management
Dec 10, 2018
In the business world, we are enamored with leadership. (A search for “Business Leadership” in Google gets 907,000,000 results.) The consensus opinion is that, “If only we had smarter, more developed, more transformed leaders our organizations would all be okay.”
Obviously, what’s missing in the world is leadership, right?
Maybe not.
Maybe your business isn’t under-led, but under-managed.
You probably have plenty of people telling other people what to do, or have enough people making plans and following up on others executing those plans. But is your business management style smart enough for the world in which we live?
If someone offered you a “management wand” to wave that would have people produce more results of a higher quality with less effort, you’d take it, wouldn’t you? (And you’d probably ask if they had a few extra in case you lost the first one.)
Smart management is like that wand.
Before we can learn the First Lesson in Smart Management, though, we need to disentangle some terms that sometimes mix together like spaghetti sauce and noodles.
The terms are “Management,” “Managers,” “Leaders” and “Administrators.”
When these terms are distinct, you are ready to learn the First Lesson. Let’s define these terms in a way that is essential for Smart Management:
Management: Coordinating the action of self and others to bring a commitment fully into existence so that the commitment is realized and persists as itself.
Manager: Someone who brings forth what is wanted and needed to cause results beyond the predictable in order to generate the fulfillment of commitments.
Administrator: Someone who shepherds the action to ensure that what was predictably going to happen in fact does happen.
Leader: Someone who declares and stands for a possible future grounded in (but not constrained) by current reality, and who enlists others to take that on as their own.
So this brings us to the First Lesson in Smart Management. Ready? Here it is:
The First Lesson in Smart Management is that, “All great managers are leaders. Not all leaders are great managers.”
In our next blog we’ll explore the Second Lesson: the First Three Principles of Smart Management.
