Schlagwort-Archive: Leadership

Real leaders

Even if the society, the economy or the enterprise are blamed for drawbacks, it is always people, who are creating, not necessarily conscious, negative circumstances. Examples are the leaders. The behavior of highly paid superiors is frequently copied by the employees. Since the fish stinks from the head, the negative properties are mainly conveyed.

  • Missing authority of the boss’s results in long-winded decision making.
  • Postponing decisions paralyses progress.
  • Missing goals create contradictory activities.
  • Blindness and deafness to the feedbacks of the employees result in a loss of confidence.

As a consequence, incongruent leadership style undermines the authority and prevents results.

Führungskraft

The employees are asked in the course of the introduction of Entrepreneurship to think and act like an enterpriser. At the same time the leadership positions are reduced to simple steps on the career ladders. The actual task of management goes in this case by the board. Employees have to fill out the role of an ‚executive’ faster than ever before, without being in the position to develop the following characteristics.

  • Power
    The takeover of a team leader position suggests that thereby the necessary power and sufficient resources are automatically available. On the one hand the purely formal transfer of power is not enough in times of increasing employee participation, in order to exert influence as well as to get acceptance and commitment from the employees. On the other hand the higher leadership levels keep the control of the planning and the budgets. Top managers decide nowadays the smallest activities and expenditures personally. For middle management only remains the title.
  • Decisiveness
    An important function of bosses it is to seize the take decisions that cannot be decided on the subordinated level. In the scope of responsibility goals should be specified that fit within the superordinate frameworks. Additionally, alternatives have to be selected, the application of resources controlled, social conflicts dissolved as well as the fundamental structure of the job positions and the procedures defined. In order to fill out the role, the executives need decisiveness. This requires decisions that are made timely and conclusive.
  • Goals
    The published plans are the basis for the staff and the other participants. The goals must fit into the big picture, but they should leave enough flexibility for the activities of the employees. Therefore the executives must make the overview available that shows the direction to the operational activities. Leaders are the specialists for the political aspects, the control of the area, the availability of the relevant information and for the control of cooperation.
  • Attentiveness
    The most important ability of the top management is the attention that is used to observe the occurrences – particularly the observation of the relationships between the employees, between employees and customers as well as between employees and suppliers. They provide the basis for the improvement measures of co-operation. Since these social aspects mostly happen on an unconscious, subliminal level, it needs a lot of instinct based on experience.
  • Style
    There is not the one, right style of leadership, but different approaches that depend on the country-specific culture, the role models of the enterprise and the personality of the leader. This might be authoritarian, democratic or liberal leadership approaches and/or any mixture of the three. It is crucial that the selected style is constantly used. The employees receive thereby an example for their orientation.

You can see in large companies more and more that the executives have promising titles, but do not show in everyday business the above characteristics. This explains the search for trainings concerning charisma, acceptance and commitment. They should enforce the self-confidence of the responsible people. Unfortunately decisiveness does not evolve, if decisions are always made on the superior levels. The ever more evolving micro management results at the same time in the fact that subordinated executives do not reflect any more about strategy, goals and activities in their responsibility. Since guidance in its actual sense does not take place, the question about the personal style of leadership will one day not appear any more, since the high-level executive is lowered to the role of a messenger of the superordinate levels.

Bottom line: The middle management mutate into highly paid employees, who

  • do not have the previous authority,
  • actually don’t need decisiveness,
  • have modest room for acting,
  • distribute only insensitively orders and
  • do not unfold a personal style.

In principle, these are good basic conditions in order to create lean structures. Unfortunately the enterprises undermine these approaches, by proclaiming flat structures. At the same time they create hierarchies that subordinate one executive to another of the same level. Formally, there will be fewer levels, than expected. The resulting ‘kings without land’, who, without budget and power, are not allowed to make their own decisions, turn into shadows of real leaders.

The future of leadership

Guidance is one of the oldest roles in societies. And nevertheless executives are continuously looking for the right style of their role. Apart from the tasks and tools of leadership managers are concerned with the following questions.

  1. How much involvement is possible?
  2. How many rules are needed?
  3. How do I distribute tasks, authorities and responsibilities?
  4. How much loyalty do I need? How does it emerge?
  5. How do I promote cooperation?
  6. How to select executives?
  7. How much leadership do we need at all?

Do new systemic concepts like holistic, autonomous units, interconnectedness, participation, and self-organization, pave the way for new, yet not recognizable styles of leadership? How does the future of leadership looks like?

Fuehrung

Executives provide goals, organize, decide, evaluate and foster employees by using various tools (e.g. role descriptions, regular communication, performance reviews). They control with it their area, create orientation and take responsibility for the results (You find more about tasks and tools of leadership here: http://www.malik-management.com/en/malik-approach/malik-basic-models).
Without leadership, these aspects have to be developed in the team and consent has to be agreed. Positive examples of self-organizing groups are the agile teams in software development and other creative professions.

Nevertheless, new approaches imply also new answers to the questions of executives.

  1. Involvement results from democratic forms of cooperation, like having a say and participation. These can also be established in connection with hierarchical structures. For a long time, autonomous, self-organizing teams are common practice in the context of bureaucratic structures, like projects, Centers of Competence or Production islands.
  2. Regulations range from chaos to orderliness and from voluntary to mandatory. They are important tools, in order to clarify the desired behavior of the employees. These rules become meaningful with the appropriate level of detail that covers the tension between patronizing and autonomy. The joint agreement of basic guidelines in the governance minimizes the number of regulations.
  3. Task, authority and responsibility (TAR) of a role should be consolidated under one roof. The best example of the distribution of TAR is the subsidiarity principle of the Vatican. It bundles decisions at the point of action. Only if this is no longer possible, the role is established on the next higher level.
  4. The loyalty is an important element of leadership that cannot be directly created. On the one hand, it results from the authoritarian or charismatic attitudes of a leader. On the other hand, it evolves from the indirect stimulation of the commitment with personal, content-wise and formal commitment amplifiers.
  5. Cooperation can be designed in various ways by using the new possibilities of networking and self-organization. The exchange of information can be realized with common intranet sites, discussion groups and blogs. The employees access via mobile PCs or smartphones their necessary data wherever and whenever. The employees meet independently of their whereabout within phone and video conferences.
  6. The selection of executives has an influence on their acceptance. However, democratic approaches like the direct selection or recruiting of leaders by the employees, does not guarantee their effectiveness. Independently of the selection procedure, there will always be some employees, who accept the boss – or not. As you can also see in politics, democratic elections result in a distribution of 51% to 49% – i.e. half of the population does not want the winner.
  7. At the latest, when the number of members of an organization exceeds the magic Dunbar number of 150, we need leadership and an adequate hierarchy. Small organizations, like start-ups, can survive for a certain time without formal structures. We should not to forget that these are also often driven autocratically by a founder.

Bottom line: Like an orchestra will never like to forgo the conductor, we cannot let go the integrating role of leadership in the future. Each undertaking needs the strategic alignment and concluding decisions by executives. The guidance becomes state-of-the-art by using the new possibilities for cooperation.