Women Know
- Leadership is Only Part of the System
Michael Paul Ervick, MBA
“You don’t manage people. You manage things. You lead people. We went overboard on the management and
forgot about leadership.”
Navy Rear
Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, 1986
The amazing wisdom of Grace Hopper is often lost in the
misapplication of this quote. It is the
back story that provides the context that allows the audience to appreciate
what she was sharing. There are few
individuals today that doubt the discovery, exploration and understanding of
leadership is critical to the guidance and governance of groups. This is true whether dealing with the endeavors
of a family, a business or our planet.
In order to better understand such concepts, there is a very natural
tendency of the general population to analyze by isolating and reducing the
concepts. Unfortunately, this process requires
that we disconnect the concept from the context of the greater system; and it
is here that our understanding begins to unravel. With that said, history has demonstrated that
to focus only on leadership in the
context of collective endeavors is a dangerous mistake.
Since the early 1970’s there has been an abundance of
quality literature published claiming leadership and management are two very
different things. In essence, leadership
is about relationships and action; management is about responsibility and
accountability. Together they form our
system of organizational guidance and governance. The authority of a manager is given by law,
and it is limited to the assets and resources.
The authority of a leader is given by followers, and it is limited by
trust and respect. Sacrifice one for the
other and our system of guidance and governance fails.
While the practices of leadership are as old as humankind,
the practices of management are relatively new.
Today, the rights and responsibilities of management are recognized and
defined across the categories of commercial, corporate, agency, contract, and
tort law.
The words and concepts of “managers” and “management”
evolved from the much older word “manage”.
Manage is originally derived from Latin.
In fact, in Spain, Italy and France, the local version of manage still
means to train or handle horses.
Originally the act of managing focused on using animals to get work
done. The transition of the term from
animal work to human work evolved in two phases. Slaves were considered property like animals,
so it was common to manage slaves. Managing
craftsmen and artisans on the other-hand was not at all common. That is because they developed their
capabilities through apprenticeships in the guild system. Once the apprenticeship was completed,
workers became known as journeymen, which indicated they could travel and work without
supervision or management. It is not
until the emergence of the English factory system that term and concept of
managing workers emerges in its modern sense.
Since the end of the Civil War, the concept of management
has been transformed by intense social forces.
Prior to this period, our nation struggled with slavery and employment; even
free men, women and children worked 14 hour days, seven days a week. Before the outlaw of slavery, our culture recognized
the relationship of employment as a property relationship whether freeperson or
slave.
With the end of slavery, our social system evolved rapidly
on views of work, labor and family. By
the end of the Great Depression, our system of guidance and governance was the
envy of the world, and Frank Abrams of Standard Oil was the poster-child for
the power of “stakeholder” relationships.
As the Second World War ended, we were exporting the idea of balance
between leadership and management through a program called “Training Within
Industry”.
When the war was over, we found ourselves in a new role as a
world leader; rebuilding the nations and cultures of friend and foe. While teaching the combined principles of
good management and leadership to the rest of the world, the American industrial
system was inconsistently sacrificing the very same principles. For eight decades following the Civil War, we
learned that leadership was about doing the right thing, and unfortunately that
interfered with goals of increasing capacity, economies of scale and lowering
cost to feed and supply a world destroyed by war. Because we stopped focusing on the
discipline, competency, systems and people, from 1950 to 1970 the United States
had diluted leadership training in the name of management training. Almost overnight, management shifted from
being “stakeholder” oriented to being “shareholder” oriented.
The imbalance between leadership and management sent the US
economy on a journey of cultural destruction.
The stakeholder relationships between management and labor – 80 years in
the making – were shattered in the name of short-term cost savings. But labor was not the only stakeholder
relationship sacrificed; relationships with suppliers, lenders and even
customers all suffered in the name of lowering costs or increasing prices to
find more profit for the bottom-line.
As a culture we failed to appreciate that management was a
system built on a foundation of leadership.
After the Second World War, to strengthen our management system, we
undermined the leadership foundation. The
imbalance of a nationwide system of guidance and governance is
devastating. No one knew this better
than the software pioneer and Navy Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper quoted at
the beginning of this paper; she understood that managers and leaders are
different sides of the same coin.
By the end of the 1980’s, Jack Welch had proven Admiral
Hopper to be right. Following the
success of his famous turn-around at General Electric, leadership development became
very popular. Now, more than 20 years after
the business culture of America embraced the notion that we had fallen behind
in our capabilities of developing leaders, we find another problem. Between the years of 1990 and 1995, a wave of
major organizations around the country began investing in leadership
development. Based on their culture of
cost control, they assumed that GE replaced their investments in management
development with programs in leadership development. By trying to imitate GE, many organizations
only compounded their problems. They failed
to realize that GE was actually trying to correct past mistakes by re-balancing
by adding investments in leadership to the existing management development
program.
As a result, today the average American managers know as
much about the principles of management as their predecessors did in the
1920’s. The lack of responsibility,
accountability and authority of management for the performance of promises is a
major issue in all organizations. The tremendous
tools of management, developed since the end of the Civil War, have been disregarded
for the last 20 years. The management
processes of planning, organizing, directing, coordinating and controlling the assets
and resources of the organization have been completely forgotten. The management directives of purpose, mission
and vision have all been reduced to meaningless window dressing.
When considering the current state of the world, our social
and cultural evolution has come a long way.
The progress made by other nations following the Second World War can be
linked to the fact that we taught the principles of TWI around the world. As each nation embraced and adapted these
principles to the strengths of their culture, we saw them in a whole new
light. We can see the breakthroughs from
thought-leaders in Japan, Israel, Greece, Germany and Sweden, and all have demonstrated
that in a system of guidance and governance, the role of leadership is
necessary but not sufficient by itself. Great
leaders must also be great managers.