BRIDGING THE GAPbetween management and leadership

Tim Taylor and Claire Best2010

MGL -- 21st Century Management - White paper 1

21st century people need 21st century

leadership

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Bridging the Gap" 3Background! 3

Executive Summary! 4

21st Century People are Different! 5

A typical scenario! 5

Fundamental shi#s! 5

Manager Profile! 6

Day-to-day Leadership Issues! 7

Key themes! 7

Team and Motivation:! 7

Organisational Change:! 8

Engagement:! 8

Global Communication:! 8

Managers Want Fast Tools! 9

New World Versus Old World?! 10

How does this theory compare with reality?! 10

universal themes! 10

harnessing diversity! 11

conclusion! 12

Engagement is an out-put of good leadership! 12

MGL -- 21st Century Management - White paper 2

BRIDGING THE GAPbetween management and leadership

Tim Taylor & Claire Best Summer 2010

BackgroundThe Making Great Leaders (MGL) Bridging the Gap between management and leadership white paper be-gan with the purpose of analyzing feedback from Middle-Managers exploring their views on leadership and documenting themes that appear from the findings.

MGL used feedback from 700 Middle-Managers from Asia, Europe and USA. Managers used are from roles in managing sales, marketing, accounting, financial analysts, technology, software development, legal pro-fessionals, tax accountants, news teams, television and web designers.

Each has held a least one degree, more often than not they have two. These are bright, articulate people who have been very successful in their careers to date. The average age range is 33 - 45 and their salary packages are in the 6 figure category.

MGL used several interdependent streams of research:

Survey research: An online survey was administered to participants that focused on leadership challenges faced, business objectives and personal learning objectives.

Conversational research: A number of telephone conversations took place with managers to establish opin-ions and gauge views on leadership.

Archival research: A number of Leadership coaching and networking calls between MGL and the managers were reviewed to gain more insight into thoughts and views of managers.

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Executive Summary

The changes that have come with the beginning of the 21st Century is a widely discussed topic, when we relate this to leadership, we can see a huge shift in behaviours and beliefs.

We are constantly analyzing feedback from Middle-Managers and more specifically, we are interested in their thoughts and views on leadership. After noticing some common themes and realising the relationship between these themes and new behaviours, we decided to look further.

21st Century leadership challenges; what are they? In a nutshell; -

• a new attitude to careers;

• no one looking for a job for life;

• faster Organisational Design cycles;

• continuously evolving skill requirements;

• rapid pace of change;

• a truly global workplace.

As we have entered the 21st Century, the role of the ‘alpha’ leader is very much in question, old models where workaholic managers rise to the top over 20 years are being challenged. The concept of leadership has developed; leadership is for everyone, it involves learning, it is team based, it is not an authoritarian and it includes followership.

What do these things mean for Middle-Managers? Managers are constantly telling us that the delivery ex-pectation never changes despite the resources available, therefore they must learn to lead their teams ef-fectively in order to increase engagement otherwise they end up filling the gap themselves. Operator managers do not make very effective leaders. They are managing a diverse mix of people who are loyal to their careers, not their companies. Managers are telling us that they need help in leading these teams. When we asked ‘What day-to-day leadership issues do you face in delivering your objectives?’, the most tagged word in their responses is ‘team’. They are asking for help to improve engagement, communica-tion and focus. They want simple tools to help them through these changes.

21st Century leadership is heavily influenced by the internet and being mobile. Managers who have grown up closely to the development of internet now expect information to be available anywhere they are. They expect to get just the information they need to carry out the task at hand, they don’t have time to read heavy tomes, they want everything bite sized . They are working in a fast paced environment, which is just getting faster. We are living in a Google world where people are demanding results quickly.

Finally, there seems to be evidence that the managers from the emerging markets have a healthier curiosity that their counterparts in the USA and Europe. This should serve as an early warning to all those involved in organisational development, this is not the time to be complacent, this is the time to put leadership devel-opment for middle-mangers firmly on the critical strategic issues agenda.

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21st Century People are Different“Leaders for our current and future business climate need not be high charisma individu-als who create followers through personal magnetism; they are people who have devel-oped the skills to confront and challenge old patterns, and spearhead new ones, at any

level in the organisation.” Porras and Collins 1

In an excerpt from 2, Peter F. suggests that to "thrive in the new millennium, managers must do more than adapt to change, they have to lead it”. This has never been more ap-

plicable than in the changing world we live in today.

The world has truly changed. It wasn’t the financial crisis that changed and it is not the economy; it is the people, their expectations and aspirations have changed fundamentally. If leadership is about anything, its about people, and when they change, leadership must respond.

A T Y P I C A L S C E N A R I O

A manager based in Minnesota describes a problem he is having with succession planning. His best people have been offered new roles and promotions within the organisation and he has encouraged them to move on. The gap he is left with is causing him personal pain. He is filling in, taking every monkey 3that comes along because there is no one else to take care of them. He remarks “even in this down market, good people are hard to find, we have no budget to persuade passive candidates to come over to us, 30 year veterans are a thing of the past, and there is no way executive management will ‘OK’ additional resources, in order to have a spare talent pool ready to fill vacancies. We are one move away from crisis. In the past we had incentives, company picnics, added benefits for working here; now these are all gone.”

F U N D A M E N T A L S H I F T S

What this manager is actually talking about is a fundamental change - a paradigm shift. Trudy Bourgeois from the Center for Workforce Excellence Generation talks about how generation X and Y workers know they're in demand as the American work force shrinks. Leaders need to learn how to keep this new wave of younger workers happy, or risk losing them. This next generation is adamant that their job will no longer be their identity - the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” is no longer being answered by a job title. Young people are more likely to give you several options earnestly believing that multiple careers, even parallel careers, is a realistic aspiration. This has generated a shift in expectations away from a job for life, to a job that, so long as it interests me, I’ll do it. This is proven by the changes we are seeing in tenure; they used to stay with their companies until retirement, 10 years ago it was common to see people staying in their jobs for 5-10 years, 5 years ago average tenure was about 3 years and now we're seeing 18 months is normal.

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1 Porras, J. & Co#ins, J., ‘Built to Last’, Century Hutchinson, London, 1994.

2 Hesselbein, F., Goldsmith, M., and Beckhard, R., (Eds), ‘The Leader of the Future’, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1996.

3 Oncken, W., Jr. and Wa#, D.L., Harvard Business Review paper, ‘Management, Who’s Got the Monkey?’, Nov-Dec 1999.

Today's generation of employees are loyal to their careers, not their companies. Employers are partly to blame since they no longer hire people as an investment, pensions are few and far between, benefits are not what they used to be; when budgets are tight or forecasts not be met, layoffs are common. This econ-omy has put more people out of work than anytime in our recent history.

The expectation for multiple careers will become the central issue of 21st Century leadership.

We must recognize the other 21st Century leadership challenges: a knowledge based environment that produces content experts, shifting the power base recognized in the old world boss employee model. The knowledge economy is dynamic and highly fluid which is demanding leadership over management. Factors such as market instability & even flatter organisations plus new value chain arrangements are all demanding new leadership beliefs and behaviours.

There is a rudimentary requirement in leadership to understand change and how it works - then lead your team through it. What great managers do, according to Marcus Buckingham (2005) 4, is understand the in-dividual strengths of each person on the team and build task assignments that exploit these strengths. Yet Middle-Managers still struggle to implement this idea. Why? The “how to” is missing from their repertoire of skills and they are under so much pressure to deliver that many end up doing a lot of work themselves.

Managers are constantly telling us that the delivery expectation never change irrespective of the resources at their disposal and they therefore feel compelled to pick up the slack, fill in and do a chunk of the work themselves. Operator managers do not make very effective leaders.

M A N A G E R P R O F I L E

They have largely been successful before they come to work with us, as far we can tell there are no remedial folks in our cohorts.

However, they are all at a juncture in their career where they are facing the question of how to leverage their skills and knowledge in order to take on larger roles within their organisations. They have come to rec-ognize the limitation of management and want to explore leadership.

Before we begin working with them we ask a number of open ques-tions to gauge what issues they are most concerned with, time after time the question that is their priority reads “how can I...” - followed by:

...become more successful?.....get more from my team?

......build a high performance team?.....handle change?

......improve engagement and communication?

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4 Marcus Buckingham, Harvard Business Review paper, ‘What Great Managers Do’, 2005.

Almost every manager we have worked with over that past 4 years falls into the following profile:

• At least one degree (more often than not, two)

• Bright, articulate people

• Successful

• Late 30- 45

• Salary packages in the 6 figure category

Successful people want to be more successful, no surprise, this should provoke the question - Is your or-ganisation doing enough to help talented managers? Or is there an assumption that they are doing fine and don’t need attention.

What we know from conducting 2,205 one-on-one sessions with over 700 managers, is that they are genu-inely interested in leadership and continued success. They need support. They need to know what to do to bridge the gap between management and leadership, as one manager remarked, “its good to take time out and examine the subtle differences being leading and managing. I can now see things I can do immedi-ately to change the value I create inside my business...”

Day-to-day Leadership IssuesWhen we ask managers ‘What day-to-day leadership issues do you face in delivering your objectives?’ the most tagged word in their responses is ‘team’ - what does this tell us? Managers are not completely selfish. They recognize that the greatest challenge they face is getting more from their team.

Given that, so much in recent times has been perpetrated on the greed of individuals, it is refreshing to learn that Middle-Managers turn up time after time, geography after geography, worried more about im-proving their team’s performance than their personal remuneration.

K E Y T H E M E S

A deeper look into the results for What day-to-day leadership issues do you face in delivering your ob-jectives? reveals 4 main themes:

This is what real managers are talking about - these are the issues that they are concerned with and want and need help to solve.

T E A M A N D M O T I V A T I O N :

The sea-change that they are searching for is locked inside these two words: Team and Motivation. Typi-cally they talk to us in terms of getting more from their team. More generally this refers to responsibility, accountability and ideas/innovation. They are less focused on getting more work or more hours. Generally the conditions inside most corporate organisations has seen to it that most people are already working tre-

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12%

24%

53%

6%

5%

Engagement Organisational change Team focus / motivation Global communication Other

mendously hard and in businesses that are knowledge based, professional hours are being stretched to breaking point. The trap many managers still find themselves in, is that they feel squeezed between trusting their teams and the risks associated with mistakes or failures. They are looking to find a way to get their teams more involved and usually they discuss this in terms of motivation. The general assumption being that perhaps people lack the motivation to take on more responsibility and more accountability. However, the issue is generally not one of motivation; most people turn up to work to do a great job. The real issue is about how the team interacts and what conditions the leader is cultivating. Patrick Lencioni (The Five Dys-function of a Team), elegantly describes the issue in terms of team dynamics setting out a simple pathway: 1. They must trust one another; 2. They can engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas; 3. They commit to decisions and plans of actions; 4. They hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans; and 5. They focus on the achievement of collective results. Managers are searching for something that gives them the beginning of a “how to” solution for this problem.

O R G A N I S A T I O N A L C H A N G E :

Who isn’t working for a company that is going through some level of reorganisation? No one. As they dis-cuss change with us they are focused primarily on making sense out of the changes the executive team are demanding. They ask us “How do we help our people understand the changes? How do we understand them? Again they are searching in the right area. Change in and of itself is not the problem, context is. When people look at change requests and they cannot understand the context they are generally skeptical even cynical. Organisational change cynicism (OCC) is the technical term. Prior research5 provides some clues regarding critical factors that can instill or perpetuate cynicism on the part of employees in organisa-tions. For example, Beer et al. (2005) claim that flawed organisational design and lack of faith in leadership can result in low commitment and ultimately cynicism. It is vital that managers have a method for combat-ing OCC, again they are searching for a “how to” guide to get them started.

E N G A G E M E N T :

This is a word introduced by consultants. It is an attempt to measure the impact of dealing with the first two issues that managers worry about. If a manager can improve team dynamics and create a truly High Per-formance Team (HPT) while at the same time build a shared vision and a narrative that makes sense of the changes, engagement will improve.

G L O B A L C O M M U N I C A T I O N :Probably the most difficult issue to pinpoint, other than to state the obvious; globalization is generating leadership challenge that range from dealing with remote and disparate teams, to issues created by genu-ine clashes in social culture. The internet and global interdependence of world markets has created a world dominated by speed. Accordingly managers and executive teams expect speed. They have embraced the abridged version of everything, in fact they demand it. News stories, news feeds, market information, its all about the germane, “Give me what I need to know and only that”, “Make my life work quicker, faster, bet-ter”. This need for speed probably goes some way to explaining why 97% of managers are saying, “Yes, I like these tools”. What they are saying is these tools solve problems I face daily, they resolve the question: ‘what do I do now?’ - the “how to” - the tools mean that they have an answer - FAST.

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5 al Change Cynicism: A Review of the Literature and Intervention Strategies

Development Journal, Fa# 2008 by Watt, John D, Piotrowski, Chris

Managers Want Fast ToolsWhen we ask managers how they could be helped in their leadership daily; the top three keywords that ap-pear are, ‘support’, ‘tools’ and ‘techniques’. Managers are telling us:

“I want practical tools that will address issues”,

“I would like to learn instruments to have a structured approach to changing habits, processes and behaviour”,

“I would like to know more about managing individual personalities”,

“I need help in planning, organizing and providing support for my team in difficult times”

With the growth in importance of self-awareness in leadership over the past decade and the increase in popularity of the 360-degree feedback process, it is no surprise that over 50% of managers are interested in tools that will help them analyze both themselves and their teams better. They want to get the most from every team member and they truly want to understand their team. One manager called the Performance Lifecycle®6 tool ‘a revelation!’ and another said ‘I want to do Competing Values Framework® 7 with my team right away’ (both self and team analysis tools). Goleman 8 writes that the “crux of leadership is self directed learning” - discover who people really are, plan a strategy built on strengths, experiment new be-haviours and develop supportive and trusting relationships that contribute to change.

Another tool that appears useful is called World-View LVR®9 , again related to ‘self awareness’ - it allows the manager to analyze their propensity to listening vs valuing vs responding. Managers often need this type of help to hone their day-to-day skills - i.e. communication - communication begins with listening.

What is similar about these tools? They are simple which in turn makes them easy and fast. Easy to learn, easy to understand, easy to replicate, fast to implement, and fast to explain. We live in a Google world. Google has taught that easy and fast are the norm and the worlds fastest search engine just got faster. People don’t even want to wait until they have finished typing their search to begin seeing possible results. What does this tell us about the people we have to lead? They want results and they want them immedi-ately. They want tools that will work and will take effect with little lead time. They want something that they can remember easily and without much effort they can put them into practice.

Companies also want to see instantaneous results. We used to run a 2 year MSc. in Corporate Leadership, an extremely successful programme in terms of individual development and accomplishment, but from a corporate perspective, too slow and too long. We cannot ignore the fact that time is a great teacher, we

also cannot ignore the fact that younger people can learn faster that we did. Agility, innovation and outpaced change come from harnessing your bright minds that hold differ-ent models of the world.

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6 Performance Life Cycle , a proprietary tool used by MGL to develop understanding and awareness of tri&ers that impact personal performance.

7 Competing Values Framework (CVF), Professor Jeff DeGraff, University of Michigan The Competing Values Framework (CVF) is the Inte#ectual Property

of Leading Change & Innovation, used with the permission of the University of Michigan.

8 Goleman, D., Boyatzio, R., and McKee, A., ‘The New Leaders: Transforming the Art of Leadership into the Science of Results’, 2002.

9 World View LVR, a proprietary instrument used by MGL to provide feedback about one-on-one communication styles.

New World Versus Old World?The rise of China and India on the global stage makes it imperative to look at their leadership styles. Tracing the traditional sources of leadership models, one of the main differences between Western nations and In-dia and China is the notion of ‘self’. In India, leadership is seen as a duty or an obligation towards the peo-ple, while in China, the leader stands apart from the people - yet with both, leadership is defined on the basis of the leaders relation to the people around him.

H O W D O E S T H I S T H E O R Y C O M P A R E W I T H R E A L I T Y ?

We analyzed the data from our Asian managers and found that in the team related questions, 100% of managers from both China and India agreed in wanting to learn more about how to work better with their teams.

‘I am interested to taking new approaches in engaging and motivating team members’

U N I V E R S A L T H E M E S

The concern for teams and the desire to learn more about motivation and improving engagement would seem to be universal themes. If India can harness the culture advantage they have in viewing leadership as an obligation towards their people, perhaps we’ll see more than incredible growth, perhaps we’ll see the emergence of truly great companies, a la Jim Collins10, coming out of India. What does this say about the Americas? Over 25% were undecided as to whether to take new ways to engage and motivate team mem-bers, this is generally worrying given our observations on the new workforce coming into corporations. Could this be a indication of the size of the group that is still holding onto old 20th century beliefs and be-haviours?

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10 Co#ins, J., ‘Good to Great’, 2001.

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’I am interested in taking new approaches in understanding and valuing different styles of working to maximize performance’

H A R N E S S I N G D I V E R S I T Y

The message of harnessing diversity has certainly gotten through. This data is probably representative of the global companies, as almost every manager we have worked with is working inside a global business. The level of undecided in the old world’s numbers is commentary about how real change lags behind intel-lectual understanding that change is needed.

McKinsey and Company 11 recently surveyed managers, their numbers reinforce this picture that some man-agers are lagging behind and are out of touch with what the new work force really needs. Only 48% of managers surveyed believed that they need to inspire. According to McKinsey, under half (46%) believed it was their responsibility to provide direction during this (the recent financial crisis) crisis. More troubling, only 30% of managers felt that they needed to motivate their employees.

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11 McKinsey and Company, ‘Leadership through the crisis and a(er: McKinsey Global Survey Results’, 2009.

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C O N C L U S I O N

Engagement is the outcome of good leadership practices. It is not improved by one action or one tool. It is improved through a combination of activities that the support the core concept “If leadership is about any-thing, its about people and change”. In these challenging times, if there is insufficient leadership through-out the ranks of middle managers, organisations will fall foul of cynicism12, this is the true enemy of growth, success and innovation.

E N G A G E M E N T I S A N O U T - P U T O F G O O D L E A D E R S H I P

A manager working out of Singapore told us that the most valuable tools he had been given helped him improve engagement within his team; this was a major concern for him as a leader. When he im-plemented leadership actions based on simple tools he saw a massive improvement. His team began sharing knowledge, communicating better and even commented on how they felt more engaged. He observed that driving change through his team was challenging at times, but the result was his man-agers driving change within their teams and relating each major change cycle back to the overall com-pany vision and values. He described his team as motivated and excited. He also talked about how managing teams in other locations had improved due to the enhanced engagement that came from sharing leadership concepts using tools.

21st Century people are different. 21st Century leadership is different. People thrive on speed, they want not one but multiple careers and they act fast. With this new dynamic environment there is a strong need for leadership as opposed to management. In order to succeed, leaders need to understand the major changes that are occurring and work with their team accordingly. Managers are telling us that in order to do this effectively they need tools; tools to help them deal with issues such as engagement, organisational change and team motivation - tools that are simple and help them bridge the gap between management and leadership. When we summarize how managers want the tools to work, we can see two obvious essen-tial qualities - Simple and Quick. Managers in the this century don't have time to digest academic tomes; this world is moving so fast, there is no time.

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12 A study published in 2009 by YouGov found that 23,600 directors, managers and employees found that employee engagement is seen as one of

the top three factors that drive an 's success - ranking higher than strategy. In hard times, with the news fu# of redundancies, re-organisations and failing businesses - a certain level of cynicism can be generated. The danger is that cynicism wi# take over and sap engagement. How can senior level managers solve this problem? The real secret to engagement begins in the relationship between managers and direct reports. If you can somehow extend that into engagement at a corporate level - even better!