Are You a Boss or a Leader?
Hello, I’m Andy Temte and welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse! Start to your weekend with me by exploring topics that span leadership, business management, education, and other musings designed to support your journey of personal and professional continuous improvement.
It’s your first management role. The mind spins with the implications and requirements of the job. For some, immediate thoughts center around whether they’ll be accepted by their new hierarchical peers and how their former peers will feel about the promotion. For others, control is the first thing that comes to mind. “I’ve been wanting to change x and can’t wait to start cascading orders to mould the team’s work. Mwahahahaha...”
If you think you can have total control in business, think again. Control is fleeting and illusory.
As an entrepreneur and then an early stage leader in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was a control freak and enjoyed the control I had over all aspects of the business I was running. A common refrain around our small, but rapidly expanding office was: “Andy said.”
At the time, I thought the phrase was innocuous, and privately, my ego loved every minute of it. However, at the time, I was blind to the long-term effects this seemingly harmless phrase would have on the business once we started to grow beyond a few dozen team members. The trick I was missing was how I needed to create balance between control and empowerment.
Fear-based Management Styles
There was a time when managers could rule through fear and intimidation. “Command and control” management philosophies were pervasive and everyone showed up for work in an emotional suit of armor in an effort to protect themselves from having their souls crushed by all the pretending we were doing. Empowered, trust-based cultures were the exception and not the norm.
Back then, the boss was pretending to be a hard a$$ who had all the answers and erected an unchallengeable, unapproachable facade of strength that hid their doubts and insecurities. Employees were pretending to be coin-operated cogs in the corporate wheel, when in reality they had many ideas for improvement and new ways of working that went unspoken because they were convinced their suggestions would be immediately shot down by their "forever-chemicals-coated supervisor.
Now, fast forward to today - we have data to support the idea that diversity and inclusion of thought and cultural backgrounds can lead to organizational foundations where trust and transparency are allowed to flourish, leading to better business outcomes, and stronger corporate cultures. When we shed the emotional suit of armor, we can see other perspectives and ideas more clearly. Mental agility is enhanced because we’re able to tap into our “whole selves” and incorporate the best we see in others. Emotional intelligence, empathy, and active listening are key workplace skills to enable collaborative work environments and empower the company’s most valuable asset - its people.
But lurking in the back of the manager’s mind are thoughts of control. “Wouldn’t it be easier if everyone thought like me and I just told everyone what to do?” It’s so easy to backslide into an “Andy said” mindset and work environment.
A High Trust - High Accountability Workplace
So how do we balance control and empowerment? How do we create a high trust, high accountability workplace? We do so by installing a clear set of guardrails and guidelines within which the organization can function. Said differently, we install a “management operating system.”
The cool thing about business is the fact that there are countless ways to design your company’s management operating system - a million ways to get it right, and many more ways to get it wrong. And the cool thing about constructing a management operating system is that the process is a journey with no fixed destination. It is along this journey that the culture of your organization will be defined.
My recommendation is to blend the tenets of continuous improvement and organizational health for optimal results. Put simply, continuous improvement is the identification/minimization of waste, a laser focus on the customer, and respect for people. Organizational health drills further into the “respect for people” component of your continuous improvement journey by placing emphasis and investment on communication, goal-setting (short and long term), measurement, and clearly defined roles/responsibilities.
A continuous improvement + organizational health management operating system creates the guidelines and guardrails to provide management and leadership with the sense of organizational control they yearn for, and simultaneously creates an open playing field within which team members can be empowered, new ideas can flourish, and constructive conflict can occur to encourage innovation. All this leads to better long-term business results. Trust has an opportunity to become rooted through the company because everyone knows what everyone else is doing; the good, bad, and ugly are on full display; what matters gets measured; and this team atmosphere discourages hiding/obfuscation and promotes a “we’re all in this together” attitude.
Conclusion
My advice to old school command-and-control leaders who are still out there is to learn more about continuous improvement and organizational health. I’m glad I did. I’m glad I let my guard down, listened, and embarked on an organizational health + continuous improvement journey with my team. It was only then that it became crystal clear that our most valuable asset was our people and that an empowered, diverse, and inclusive workforce can do amazing things at scale.
Have a great weekend as you recharge for the week ahead.
