مکالمه

BEC : Leadership -Conversation

AJ: Let’s talk about leadership now and, especially, how this word leadership differs from the idea of management. In the last lesson set we talked about management and what we were really talking about was management at a tactical level. I think of leadership as more at the strategic level, so when you think of great business leaders of course you can think of people at the very top, people like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson at Virgin, the founders of many of the large companies we all know; all that kind of thing.

Really it’s about creating a culture, so leaders do more than just manage individual people, set specific goals and kind of push people towards those goals. At the higher level, at the strategic level, leaders focus on having kind of a bigger vision, really a bigger long-term vision.

The leaders are the ones who really have that vision of the future, what they want the company to be about, the direction, the big direction they want the company to go, so often leaders are focused on things like creating a purpose, a deeper purpose, creating a mission, creating a culture in the company, a certain kind of culture, a culture of excellence, a culture of innovation. All of these kinds of things which are very much at a higher more strategic level and they’re also more focused on the long-term.

Then, of course, down the ranks you’ve got managers who have to make all of this stuff happen and figure out exactly how. How are we going to make the leader’s vision a reality? How are we going to make the long-term vision and plan happen step by step? George: Yes, I’d say that’s pretty true on a big scale. Leadership generally in a company begins at the top and, as you say, it’s the people that have the vision and the image, whatever you want to call it, of where they want to take a company.

Now, the good leaders, the true leaders at that level are the ones that not only have that, but they have a unique ability. I’m not even going to call it a skill, but they have an ability to want people to follow them. That’s really what leaders are, people want to follow them. As you say, they create a culture.

Some of the examples that I’m aware of, I think Jack Welch with GE was certainly a leader, Arnold Schwarzkopf. Schwarzkopf, no … Yeah, Schwarzkopf, I’m getting him mixed up with the actor. Schwarzkopf, the general for the United States, a four or five star general, I’m not sure which he was, he was a leader. Now, he led somewhat through the means of authority and there are different ways that people lead, but still he was a leader. Tom Watson and Tom Watson, Jr. for IBM, they were leaders. I’d have to say that probably Bill Gates could be considered a leader.

So at that level, as you say, we’re talking about people who maybe have worked their way up through the ranks of the company or maybe they were just entrepreneurs with a vision and a thought that they wanted to move forward with and they had that innate ability to get people to follow them, to get people to listen to them, to get people excited about where they were going or they wanted to go and gather people behind them that not only wanted to, but were willing to follow them on this mission to accomplish something.

AJ: You know I think that big idea of a mission or a purpose, the thing that leaders really do is they connect the activities of the business --since we’re talking about business leaders here - to a purpose that’s bigger and more noble, more meaningful than just all the individual tasks. Within an individual job, your job might be to take phone calls from customers and solve problems.

So, I don’t know, that might be a fun job or it might be a miserable job depending on who you are and what it’s like, but it’s a very kind of small vision. Every day you’re taking the phone calls, answering the questions, so it could be very easy to forget that that little task is connected to a much bigger vision for the whole company.

Let’s imagine that the company is dedicated to really having excellent, superb customer service. There’re not many American companies that do that, a few like Apple do. Let’s imagine that that’s kind of the big purpose so the leader really wants to connect all the workers to that larger purpose, that bigger vision. They help people feel that there’s a bigger meaning to their individual job. They help people connect their individual job to the larger, deeper and more meaningful purpose of the entire company.

That’s what the really good ones do and so they really have more focused, more motivated, more innovative, more energized employees and, of course, the opposite is true. Poor leaders don’t do that and so it’s easy for people to get lost in their little individual jobs and forget the big picture, not really feel a sense of meaning, just feel like ah, every day I’m just doing my job, who cares. I think that’s a big thing.

Of course, leaders are not only the ones at the very top. They’re the most visible ones, but managers can also be leaders at different levels as well. It’s fine to be just a manager and helping people achieve their goals, but the really great managers, especially the managers that start going up higher and higher and higher in the company, are ones who also have this leadership ability, this ability to inspire people by seeing a larger picture, seeing the bigger mission and getting people connected to that and really feeling it and believing in it.

George: Yes, I agree. You cannot overlook leadership throughout from top to bottom in a company. Certainly you would hope that you’re working in an organization - a company - where the top person or persons, maybe a couple of them, are true leaders, but the good companies, the companies you want to work for, there’s leaders strung throughout the entire organization. Maybe they aren’t the ones that have the total vision and the total mission or didn’t create it, but they have somehow or other wrapped themselves around that vision and that mission and implemented some of their own management philosophy or operational duties or programs.

They are the ones that even at the first line level where employees will look to their manager who may be the lowest manager on the rung, but if he’s got leadership skills and he or she displays them, people will want to follow that person. When you want to follow someone it just makes a world of difference in your job because you are following the lead of a leader --a manager --and you’re happy to go that direction.

In fact, it doesn’t even have to be a manager. Sometimes leaders evolve just from teams. As I said, sometimes they’re appointed by authority, but that doesn’t really make for a leader. True leaders I think come from either the way they act and you want to follow them because of what they do and how they do it or just plain old charisma.

AJ: Yeah, that’s true. That’s right, leadership is not a position. It’s more of a quality and a way of acting. So sometimes, I’d say many times actually, you may have a team and then you have the official manager. That’s their job.

Their job is to manage. They’re the ones who do the reviews of your performance. They’re the ones who decide if you get a promotion or a raise or not.

Leadership is a whole different thing. Leaders are the one really, again, who can get people motivated and moving in the same direction, excited about something. It may be that just a frontline worker is actually the true leader of the group. So the official manager might be the leader or they might not be.

They might not be the person that really inspires people that people really look to.

I think leaders have this kind of evangelical almost feeling sometimes where they really strongly believe in something, you know the company or a mission or a certain project, whatever it is, and that strong, powerful believe helps to create that charisma. It really gets people excited and wanting to follow them, wanting to join in this mission or this purpose.

George: Sure. A great example of that is look at any religion in the world. The top person or people in that religion have that commitment; have that inner strength and people want to follow them, so it’s certainly there.

In terms of a business or organization or just about anything, you want to work for a leader. That’s the kind of manager you want. Put it this way, they’re moving forward all the time and you want to be attached to that person as best you can. So if you can find your way to work for a manager who’s truly a leader and you can spot them, you can see them, take advantage of it because it will take your career right up to the sky just like theirs.

The End.