by Julian Simcox
Actually, it doesn’t much matter because everyone needs to be able to choose between managing and leading – as distinct and yet mutually complementary action/ logics – and to argue that one is better than the other, or worse to try to school people about just one of them on its own, is inane. The UK’s National Health Service for example is currently keen on convincing medics that they should become “clinical leaders”, the term “clinical manager” being rarely heard, yet if anything the NHS suffers more from a shortage of management skill.
It is not only healthcare that is short on management. In the first half of my career I held the title “manager” in seven different roles, and in three different organisations, and had even completed an Exec MBA, but still didn’t properly get what it meant. The people I reported into also had little idea about what “managing well” actually meant, and even if they had possessed an inclination to coach me, would have merely added to my confusion.
If however you are fortunate enough to be working in an organisation that over time has been purposefully developed as a “Learning Culture” you will have acquired an appreciation of the vital distinction between managing and leading, and just what a massive difference this makes to your effectiveness, for it requires you, before you act, to understand (11) how your system is really flowing and performing. Only then will you be ready to choose whether to manage or to lead.
It is therefore not your role’s title that matters but whether the system you are running is stable, and whether it is capable of producing the outcomes needed by your customers. It also matters how risk is to be handled by you and your organisation when you are making changes. Outcomes will depend heavily upon you and your team’s accumulated levels of learning – as well, as it turns out, upon your personal world view/ developmental stage (more of which later).
Here is a diagram that illustrates that there are three basic learning contexts that a “managerial leader” (7) needs to be adept at operating within if they are to be able to nimbly choose between them.
Depending on one’s definitions of the processes of managing and leading, most people would agree that the first learning context pertains to the process of managing, and the third to the process of leading. The second context (P-D-S-A) which helpfully for NHS employees is core to the NHS “Model of Improvement” turns out to be especially vital for effective managerial leadership for it binds the other two contexts together – as long as you know how?
Following the Mid-Staffs Hospital disaster, David Cameron asked Professor Don Berwick to recommend how to enhance public safety in the UK’s healthcare system. Unusually for a clinician he gets the importance of understanding your system and knowing moment-to-moment whether managing or leading is the right course of action. He recommends that to evolve a system to be as safe as it can be, all NHS employees should “Learn, master and apply the modern methods of quality control, quality improvement and quality planning” (1). He makes this recommendation because without the thinking that accompanies modern quality control methods, clinical managerial leadership is lame.
The Journal of Improvement Science has recently re-published my 10 year old essay called:
“Intervening into Personal and Organisational Systems by Powerfully Leading and Wisely Managing”
Originally written from the perspective of a practising executive coach, and as a retrospective on the work of W. Edwards Deming, the essay describes just what it is that a few extraordinary Managerial Leaders seem to possess that enables them to simultaneously Manage and Lead Transformation – first of themselves, and second of their organisation. The essay culminates in a comparison of “conventional” and “post-conventional” organisations. Toyota (9,12) in which Deming’s influence continues to be profound, is used as an example of the latter. Using the 3 generic intervention modes/ learning contexts, and the way that these corresponds to an executive’s evolving developmental stage I illustrate how this works and with it what a massive difference it makes. It is only in the later (post-conventional) stages for example that the processes of managing and leading are seen as two sides of the same coin. Dee Hock (6) called these heightened levels of awareness “chaordic” and Jim Collins (2) calls the level of power this brings “Level 5 Leadership”.
Berwick, borrowing from Deming (4,5) knows that to be structured-to-learn organisations need systems thinking (11) – and that organisations need Managerial Leaders who are sufficiently developed to know how to think and intervene systemically – in other words he recognises the need for personally developing the capability to lead and manage.
Deming in particular seemed to understand the importance of developing empathy for different worldviews – he knew that each contains coherence, just as in its own flat-earth world Euclidian geometry makes perfect sense. When consulting he spent much of his time listening and asking people questions that might develop paradigmatic understanding – theirs and his. Likewise in my own work, primed with knowledge about the developmental stage of key individual players, I am more able to give my interventions teeth.
Possessing a definition of managerial leadership that can work at all the stages is also vital:
Managing = keeping things flowing, and stable – and hence predictable – so you can consistently and confidently deliver what you’re promising. Any improvement comes from noticing what causes instability and eliminating that cause, or from learning what causes it via experimentation.
Leading = changing things, or transforming them, which risks a temporary loss of stability/ predictability in order to shift performance to a new and better level – a level that can then be managed and sustained.
If you resonate with the first essay you need to know that after publishing it I continued to develop the managerial leadership model into one that would work equally well for Managerial Leaders in either developmental epoch – conventional and post-conventional – whilst simultaneously balancing the level of change needed with the level of risk that’s politically tolerable – and all framed by the paradigm-shifts that typically characterise these two epochs. This revised model is described in detail in the essay:
“Managerial Leadership: Five action logics viewed via two developmental lenses”
– also soon to be made available via the Journal of Improvement Science.
References
- Berwick Donald M. – Berwick Review into patient safety (2013)
- Collins J.C. – Level 5 Leadership: The triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve – HBR Jan 2001
- Covey. S.R. – The 7 habits of Highly Effective People – 1989 (ISBN 0613191455)
- Deming W. Edwards – Out of the Crisis – 1986 (ISBN 0-911379-01-0)
- Deming W.E – The New Economics – 1993 (ISBN 0-911379-07-X) First edition
- Hock. D. – The birth of the Chaordic Age 2000 (ISBN: 1576750744)
- Jaques. E. – Requisite Organisation: A Total System for Effective Managerial Organisation and Managerial Leadership for the 21st Century 1998 (ISBN 1886436045)
- Kotter. J. P. – A Force for Change: How Leadership Differs from Management – 1990
- Liker J.K & Meier D. – The Toyota Way Fieldbook. 2006
- Scholtes Peter R. The Leader’s Handbook: Making Things Happen, Getting Things Done. 1998
- Senge. P. M. – The Fifth Discipline 1990 ISBN 10-0385260946
- Spear. S. – Learning to Lead at Toyota – Harvard Business Review – May 2004