Leadership has been getting all the spotlight in recent years, but management is really where the action is if you want results. Management is the hard work of developing (as well as sustaining) an environment that supports people to be successful in a common goal. The common goal, of course is the success of your company.

Joel Spolsky said it well:

You can go into any coffee shop in the country and order a short soy caramel latte extra-hot, and you’ll find that you have to keep repeating your order again and again: once to the coffee maker, again to the coffee maker when they forgot what you said, and finally to the cashier so they can figure out what to charge you. That’s the result of nobody telling the workers a better way. Nobody figures it out, except Starbucks, where the standard training involves a complete system of naming, writing things on cups, and calling out orders which insures that customers only have to specify their drink orders once. The system, invented by Starbucks HQ, works great, but workers at the other chains never, ever come up with it on their own… As a manager it’s your job to figure out a system. That’s Why You Get The Big Bucks. [emphasis mine]

One reason the two are often confused is due to style. Management has become associated with an authoritarian style aka “Command and Control” Leadership has become associated with an more “empowering” style.

Sigurd Rinde makes this mistake in his post about leading children as training for MBAs.

When dealing with knowledge workers in our more flexible economy it’s usually more useful to use a more inclusive, empowering style whether you are leading or managing (not always but usually). It’s absurd to think you can create an environment that supports people without their input. But just leading people will not develop a scalable organization.

Takeaways:

• Managing is hard work.
• Managing in a respectful, inspiring way is even harder.
• Managing any other way is counterproductive so suck it up and get to work.

[tags] Managing, Leading, Management, CEO Skills, Entrepreneur [/tags]

photo courtesy of GeekPhilosopher

This from Paul Orfalea
[founder of Kinkos which got acquired by FedEx
and now has 1,200 stores in 10 countries]

You must be flexible and astute and focus on the big picture. Busyness is not your friend. Startup entrepreneurs too often try to run away from their anxiety by being busy. But you have to leave time open on your schedule for hard thinking rather than hard working. Make sure you get plenty of sleep take vacations and don’t get mired in the details either at the store or at your headquarters. You don’t have to be at your desk in order to analyze cash-flow projections or revenue-by-category data, both of which I love to pore over by the way. Can’t get enough of it. You, as an owner have to be smart about managing your relationship with time. My definition of owning a business is to make money while you’re sleeping. If you can’t make money while you are sleeping, then your business owns you – you don’t own it.

Takeaways:

• Leave time in your schedule for hard thinking not hard working
• Get plenty of sleep
• Take vacations
• Don’t get mired in the details

[tags] start-up, entrepreneur, CEO skils, running a business [/tags]

One of the services that makes this blog worth every dollar you pay for it, is the time I take to scour the web and find the gems for you. Two posts in blogs I love come together today under the heading :Why didn’t I think of that?

Seth Godin says make sure your system works before you make it bigger. DUH! My refinements are: Make sure you can sell before you spend more on marketing and advertising. And make sure you can sell at a profit (including the cost of sales) before you do more of it. No sense paying people to take your stuff.

Guy Kawasaki posts an interview with Jeffrey Pfeffer author of “What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management.” 16 questions and answers – You could spend 6 months on each one and your company would see vast improvement. Here are a couple of my favorites:

Question: What can companies do to get smarter?
Answer: Companies learn just like people learn—by trying new things and seeing what happens. That requires, first, a tolerance for failure, since by definition, learning means doing things you aren’t very good at.
Second, it requires structured self-reflection—after-action or after-event reviews so that instead of having one year of experience repeated 20 times, people and companies actually accumulate learning over time.

Question: What is the proper role for a CEO?
Answer: To develop others and their talents and to create an environment in which people can do their best and want to. It is not to make all the decisions or, like some kind of “sun king,” absorb all the light and the attention.

In fact, sometimes, as the Grammy-award winning Orpheus Chamber orchestra shows, the best leadership is less leadership. No seed can grow if it is dug up and examined every week, and for people to innovate and get things done, sometimes they need some time and space and resources.

Takeaways:

• Take time to think so you can see the obvious.
• You can’t work smarter if you’re working all the time.

[tags]small business, management, CEO Skills, entrepreneur [/tags]