Sorting the leader manager thing

Roles and verbs

The leader / manager distinction.

I’ve seen chapters in textbooks on it.  I’ve seen MBA courses spend an entire session debating this.   And I’ve never got any use out of any of it.

Here’s a way to sort this out that is actually useful:

Manager is a type of role.  If you are accountable for the work of someone else, then guess what?  You are a manager.  Just like if you are accountable for the work of moving a football forward to score goals, you are a football player.

(How much time do you think people running football clubs spend discussing ‘what is a football player?’) Read more…

How to increase your capability

I had some questions from my last post on cognitive capability on how to increase it.  Here’s the answer:

Don’t smoke.  The is the single most important thing you can do to increase your capability.

The second is 30 minutes of movement per day.

The third is healthy diet.

Not what you expected?   The thing is, the only way you can increase your cognitive capability is to not die.  This is because while your cognitive capability will unfold at it’s own rate, that rate has been shown by research to be predictable over time. Read more…

See the whole board

Some people just get it.  When faced with decisions they seem to see what others can’t.   One second before they gave their view, you were floundering, not sure which way to go.  Now it seems so obvious it’s almost embarrassing.

We know this ability when we see it.  Here’s a 3-minute clip so you can see an example for yourself (link here if you can’t see anything):

At 2:20 Sam Seaborn says “I don’t know the word”, as he’s trying to work out how President Bartlet pieces it all together.

Well….there is a word.  Two words.  It’s called cognitive capability, Read more…

Politics at work start early

Politics - embedded

Here’s four quick quotes from current jobs being advertised, spot the common word:

• “You will posses demonstrated leadership, influencing and negotiation skills”
• “…excellent communication and influencing skills”
• “..combine specialist knowledge with strong management and influencing skills”
• “Excellent communication and influencing skills at all levels”.

All of these jobs are operational or audit roles, not sales or business development.  Which means the people they are influencing are internal people in the same organisation.  We have set up a political organisation from the start.

Read more…

The five factors of individual performance (it’s not personality)

I think out of the box, I'm a type J.A.C.K

Managers in Australia love to try to ‘get into the mind’ of their people.  Robert Spillane’s book The Rise of Psycho Management in Australia‘ contains an excellent analysis of how this came about, and the effects that it has had.  One fact that might be startling to some is that the empirical evidence shows that the amount of performance difference that is due to personality is 4%.

Yep, 4%.  In other words, 96% of the variation in performance is due to something other than personality type.

So what are the factors that determine performance?  I like to use the model put forward by Elliott Jaques, if you want to go to the source, track down either Executive Leadership which he wrote with Stephen Clement, or Requisite Organization.

Here are his factors:

Cognitive Capability: does the person have the ability to handle the amount of variables, options and choices the role requires.  This Read more…

Five simple manager mistakes

There are some pretty common mistakes managers make at any level.  How do I know this?  I’ve made them.  Here they are:

1. Not knowing your own job.

Every manager has generic things they need to do because they are accountable for the work of their team, but they also have a unique contribution to make beyond managing their people.  For example, a manager who is in charge of multiple teams is also accountable for improving the way work occurs across all of their teams, while a general manager is responsible for moving the business into new areas and shutting down the old. Read more…