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Calling All Managers to Execute and Innovate
Management is getting harder because, frankly, the world is becoming more competitive. To be able to build a successful business today, you not only have to be able to come up with the right strategy and execute that strategy, you also have to be able to adapt and change that strategy many times, and many of those adaptations and changes must really involve breakthrough innovation and not simply incremental innovation. So companies need managers who know how to be not only value creators or deal with execution, but they need managers who know how to be game changers and figure out how to deal with innovation.
What kind of leader is required if you’re going to work in a world where you have to worry about both execution and change and innovation is a leader who knows not only how to close what one of my other colleagues refers to as performance gaps – gaps between where you are and where you should be. But also opportunity gaps – gaps between where you are and where you could be. Because those organizations that have leadership in them throughout the organization who understand, and are always worrying about, where you could be and not where you should be, are much more likely to be prepared to take advantage of opportunities that will come along. As we all know, it takes organizations much longer to change and get ready to do whatever you need them to do than any of us would like. Unless you have managers who are thinking about and looking for those weak signals and those trends about what’s going to be next, you’re always going be, as an organization, behind.
Three Managerial Imperatives
When you hear the word “boss,” you immediately think about – I think all of us imagine either a good boss we had or a bad boss we had. So as we’re talking about this, we’re really talking about, how do you really use the privilege of having formal authority over others to do what’s right? To get things done in your organization and to getting to build your own successful career? And so in looking at that question, I had done earlier work on what the transition is like from being an individual contributor to being a boss. What I found was that many very experienced managers were reading this work that I had written for, if you will, new managers. And the reason they were doing that, in fact, in part was because they didn’t really think about the fact that being an effective boss, or being a leader, again is about managing yourself first and foremost. So the first imperative is about managing yourself because you’re using yourself, as I said, as an instrument.
The second imperative is managing your network, and this is managing your network of relationships with people over whom you do not have formal authority: your bosses, your peers, maybe people outside the organization. We made that the second imperative because frankly, too often, people don’t pay enough attention and don’t see as their job, if you will, managing bosses and peers. They sort of say to themselves, “If the organization is designed correctly, I can just look down and do my job.” Well, this is the piece that has to do with sort of the political dynamics of organizational life, and if you don’t manage that properly, then you are a powerless boss. And if any of you have worked for a powerless boss, you know how horrible that can be. So managing your network of relationships is a way that you make sure that your team will have the resources it needs to get the job done. And your team will have the right expectations set for it because you’ve actually as a manager spent time managing that network of relationships.
The third imperative, then, is managing your team, and that’s what most people think of first when they think about being the boss or leadership – the people over whom they do have formal authority. That’s the last group we want you to think about, in a way, because that’s where people tend to go and leave out that this is really about managing yourself and also managing that network. So in terms of managing the team, that piece of the puzzle is, again, working with those people that you do have formal authority over, and one of the critical messages there is, frankly, even though you do have formal authority over those people, that is not a very useful source of power. You actually have to develop other sources of power if you really want to influence people to do the kind of work we need people to be doing today.