i and A Services - Leadership and Management

Leadership and Management
Working On The Business

"There is a difference between leadership and management. Leadership is of the spirit, compounded of personality, vision and training. Its practice is an art. Management is a science and of the mind. Managers are necessary, leaders are indispensable." Admiral J. Moorer

"Leaders tolerate chaos and lack of structure and are thus prepared to keep answers in suspense. Managers seek order and control and are almost addicted to disposing of problems even before they understand their significance." Abraham Zaleznik, Harvard Business School

Leadership - Preparing organisations for change and helping them cope as they struggle through it.

"A leader is a dealer in hope." Napoleon Bonaparte
Leadership is about coping with change.
Leading an organisation to constructive change begins by setting a direction - developing a vision of the future along with strategies for producing the changes needed to achieve that vision.
Leadership develops the capacity to achieve the vision by aligning people - communicating the new direction to those who can create coalitions that understand the vision and are committed to its achievement.
In terms of leadership, achieving a vision requires motivating and inspiring - keeping people moving in the right direction, despite major obstacles to change, by appealing to basic but often untapped human needs, values and emotions.

Management - Coping with complexity by creating human systems that can implement plans as precisely and efficiently as possible.
Management is about coping with complexity.
Without good management, organisations can become chaotic in ways that threaten their existence.
Organisations manage complexity first by planning and budgeting - setting targets or goals for the future, establishing detailed steps for achieving those targets, and then allocating resources to accomplish those plans.
Management develops the capacity to achieve its plan by organising and staffing - creating an organisational structure and set of jobs for accomplishing plan requirements, staffing the jobs with qualified individuals, communicating the plan to those people, delegating responsibility for carrying out the plan, and devising systems to monitor implementation.
Management ensures plan accomplishment by controlling and problem solving - monitoring results versus the plan in some detail, both formally and informally, by means of reports, meetings, and other tools; identifying deviations; and then planning and organising to solve the problems.

Change - Altering what you are doing to improve something that is already possible in your reality.
"Resisting change is like holding one's breath - Success is fatal."
Change involves an alteration in the arena of process.
You alter what you are doing to improve results you already have.
Change provides an improvement in the existing way of doing business while the organisation and its leaders essentially remain the same.
Do not underestimate the intensity of the human condition to prefer the status quo - astute change management is essential to foster real change.

Transformation - Altering or re-inventing the way you are being to create something that is currently not possible in your reality.
Transformation is an alteration in the arena of context ... you alter the way you and your organisation are being to create results that are not currently possible. Transformation provides the creation of that which does not yet exist in the organisation and its leaders; a new realm of possibility leading to a new realm of results.
Transformation is not simply a 'big change' or a 'significant change.' Transformation is a function of altering or re-inventing the way you and your organisation are being to create something that is not possible in the current reality.

Strategic Planning - Researching and exploring options to develop, refine, determine and communicate a long term plan that serves the best interests of the customers, shareholders and staff.
'Strategy' is a long term plan of action that is designed to achieve a particular objective or goal, as distinct from tactics or immediate actions that use the current resources at hand.
Determining and then executing an effective strategic plan is one of the key challenges facing the leadership and management of all organisations. Sometimes you will elect traditional Red Ocean strategies; strategies that keep you in your existing market space trying to beat your competitors by making smart value-cost trade-offs ahead of the curve to exploit existing demand. In other circumstances you will devise and adopt Blue Ocean Strategies that create uncontested market space by breaking the value-cost trade-off in ways that make the competition irrelevant and capture new demand.
Whatever the mix of strategies you choose to pursue in your plan, all strategies are most effective when they genuinely contribute to your organisation's purpose, are consistent with your organisation's values and progress your core strategic vision; where you are going, how you are going to get there and why you will be successful.

BPR and BPI - Business Process Reengineering (BPR) and Business Process Improvement (BPI) to achieve effective change at the process level.
If you are seeking a transformation then it is very important that you first provide yourself and the members of your key leadership and management team the opportunity to personally experience and understand transformation for themselves. After they have shifted their own paradigm about what is possible for the organisation and for themselves, then and only then can that team provide effective leadership to re-invent the organisation. This will involve the 'Heavy Blasting' of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) and then progressive refinement of the resulting new processes with Business Process Improvement (BPI).

Execution, Execution, Execution - Executing the plan to achieve the target outcomes; a strategy is not real until it has been successfully implemented with action.
"Set a direction and execute like hell" Jack Walsh, Chairman & CEO of General Electric, 1981 (Market Value US$14B) - 2001 (Market Value US$410B).
A little known fact is that the Apollo Moon missions were on course less than 1% of the time. The mission was composed of almost constant mid-course corrections. That's also true of most business and community situations." James Belasco, Staying On Course.
Whatever the mix of change and transformation you are seeking to achieve, the outcome of any plan ultimately depends upon its execution. Successfully executing the mix and sequence of tasks required to achieve the strategic intent of a plan can often be a dynamic and uncertain endeavor. Without the enrollment and ownership of the plan (What, Who and By When) from the strategic intent to the individual task level by the right people, most otherwise sound plans do not survive their first encounter with reality.

Executing a plan means doing what it takes to have the plan work, including changing the plan. This requires the application of an astute a blend of science and art, technical and people skills; intellectual, emotional and spiritual intelligence; commitment, passion, insight, experience, wisdom, credibility, empowerment, courage, boldness, rigor, sensitivity, intuition, persistence, flexibility and compassion.
Not a simple affair ...

Any initiative will almost certainly fail if executing the plan seeks to simply impose a new way - even if it is intended to be in the best interests of the target community. In many cases, despite genuine benefits that could be achieved, resistance to the implementation can be so strong that the project is actively attacked or sabotaged by a hostile target community. On the other hand, when genuine ownership of the plan is nurtured honestly and openly within the target community and supported with astute Change Management, even the most challenging initiative can be implemented successfully.

Leadership and Management is Working On The Business
What Could Go Wrong?
Mmmm ... What Could Go Right!

"Go to the people, Learn from them, Love them.
Start with what they know, Build on what they have.
And of the best leaders, when their work is accomplished, when their task is done,
The people will remark, We have done it ourselves." 2,000 Year Old Chinese Poem

"We trained hard but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be re-organised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by re-organising; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation." Petronius Arbiter, Roman General, 210 B.C.

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