Identifying Problems as a Manager Harvard Business Review
The Idea in Brief
Tough, persistent; smart, analytical; tolerant, and of good will—all qualities yous desire in your best managers. How else can they perform their jobs: solving problems and directing people and affairs?
Just let's face it: It takes neither genius nor heroism to be a director. Even highly valued managers don't inflame employees' passions and imagination. Nor do they stimulate the change that all organizations crave. For those qualities, you lot need leaders, non managers.
In this 1977 groundbreaking article, Abraham Zaleznik challenged the traditional view of management. That view, he argued, omits essential leadership elements of inspiration, vision, and human passion—which drive corporate success.
Managers and leaders are two different animals. Leaders, like artists, tolerate anarchy and lack of structure. They keep answers in suspense, preventing premature closure on of import issues. Managers seek order, control, and rapid resolution of problems.
Companies need both managers and leaders to excel. Just too often, they don't create the right environment for leaders to flourish. Zaleznik offers a solution.
The Idea in Practice
##Managers##Leaders Attitudes toward goals##•Take an impersonal, passive outlook.#•Goals arise out of necessities, not desires.##•Accept a personal, active outlook. Shape rather than respond to ideas. Alter moods; evoke images, expectations. #•Change how people think about what's desirable and possible. Set company direction. Conceptions of work##•Negotiate and coerce. Rest opposing views.#•Design compromises. Limit choices.#•Avoid risk.##•Develop fresh approaches to problems.#•Increase options. Turn ideas into exciting images.#•Seek gamble when opportunities appear promising. Relations with others##•Prefer working with people, but maintain minimal emotional involvement. Lack empathy.#•Focus on process, e.g., how decisions are made rather than what decisions to brand.#•Communicate past sending ambiguous signals. Subordinates perceive them as inscrutable, detached, manipulative. Organization accumulates bureaucracy and political intrigue.##•Attracted to ideas. Chronicle to others directly, intuitively, empathetically.#•Focus on substance of events and decisions, including their meaning for participants.#•Subordinates describe them with emotionally rich adjectives; e.g., "honey," "hate." Relations appear turbulent, intense, disorganized. All the same motivation intensifies, and unanticipated outcomes proliferate. Sense of self##•Comes from perpetuating and strengthening existing institutions.#•Feel part of the organization.##•Comes from struggles to profoundly alter human and economic relationships.#•Feel separate from the organization.
Can Organizations Develop Leaders?
Zaleznik suggests two ways to develop leaders. First, avoid overreliance on peer-learning situations, due east.m., job forces. They stifle the aggressiveness and initiative that fuel leadership.
2nd, cultivate one-to-one relationships between mentors and apprentices; e.g., a CEO chooses a talented novice as his special assistant. These close working relationships encourage intense emotional interchange, tolerance of competitive impulses, and eagerness to challenge ideas—essential characteristics of leadership.
The traditional view of management, back in 1977 when Abraham Zaleznik wrote this article, centered on organizational structure and processes. Managerial development at the time focused exclusively on building competence, control, and the appropriate balance of power. That view, Zaleznik argued, omitted the essential leadership elements of inspiration, vision, and man passion—which drive corporate success.
The difference betwixt managers and leaders, he wrote, lies in the conceptions they hold, deep in their psyches, of anarchy and order. Managers embrace process, seek stability and control, and instinctively try to resolve problems quickly—sometimes before they fully understand a problem'south significance. Leaders, in dissimilarity, tolerate chaos and lack of construction and are willing to filibuster closure in gild to understand the issues more than fully. In this mode, Zaleznik argued, business leaders accept much more in common with artists, scientists, and other creative thinkers than they do with managers. Organizations need both managers and leaders to succeed, just developing both requires a reduced focus on logic and strategic exercises in favor of an environment where creativity and imagination are permitted to flourish.
What is the ideal mode to develop leadership? Every society provides its ain respond to this question, and each, in groping for answers, defines its deepest concerns about the purposes, distributions, and uses of ability. Business organization has contributed its reply to the leadership question by evolving a new breed called the manager. Simultaneously, business has established a new power ethic that favors collective over individual leadership, the cult of the group over that of personality. While ensuring the competence, control, and the rest of power amongst groups with the potential for rivalry, managerial leadership unfortunately does non necessarily ensure imagination, creativity, or ethical behavior in guiding the destinies of corporate enterprises.
A version of this commodity appeared in the January 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review.
Source: https://hbr.org/2004/01/managers-and-leaders-are-they-different
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