Too Many Bosses Too Few Leaders Pdf 15
Rivka Licklider
Employees are human, and mistakes are to be expected. Who you are as a boss is evident in how you deal with mishaps. While bosses are more likely to use a reward-and-punishment system to discourage poor behavior, great leaders understand that employees benefit from encouragement and mentorship. If an employee performs well in a specific line of work, that strength should be recognized and mastered.
"Leader" has become a buzzword routinely used to describe... everyone. "Everyone is a leader" fad, promoting thinking that you are a leader as you are (an adult fairy tale, if you ask me!), has spread everywhere and it is just as annoying as calorie counting and extensive political correctness. And just as useless and counter-productive. If anything, it only adds to a growing number of bosses, managers, CEOs, CFOs, COOs (gotta love a bit of a politically correct C-word) who think they are leaders, but all they really are is wannabe leaders.
Secondly, it waters down the significance and uniqueness of the art of leadership. It doesn't recognise the importance of effort, time and personal development. Instead, it says you are special as you are, you can lead crowds and they will follow because you said so (duh!), you were practically born a two-legged unicorn.
Thirdly, it creates and feeds a belief that leadership can be bought. The Internet is filled with coaches claiming you can be a leader if only you buy their course for $14,500 in full or $5,000 in three instalments (bargain!) and the corporate world is filled with Future Leaders programmes that teach people how to motivate employees (which is a myth, anyway) and manage tasks, which has little to do with leadership. Please, can we start calling them Future Managers or Future Partners programmes?
Real leadership cannot exist without compassion, empathy, courage, integrity and humility. If we define leadership as serving a higher purpose (do not confuse with making dollar bills!) and empowering those you lead so that they can reach their potential (so that, in turn, you can reach your potential), then real leadership cannot and will not exist without compassion, empathy, courage, integrity and humility. If I think of it this way, then the puzzle of why we are lacking real leaders it's easy to solve. Real leaders do things that 'just bosses' don't...
Why is empathy so important in leadership? Because it allows a leader to work with people from a variety of backgrounds, from different walks of life and at different stages of their lives. It doesn't matter whether you are talking to a cleaner, a client or a stakeholder, empathy allows you to connect with the person. It makes you care (think about the REAL care I mentioned above) and it makes you authentic. And only if you care about your people, will you work hard to make them reach their potential (as a mater of fact, it will be your mission), and only when you are authentic, will people follow you wholeheartedly, because they will be able to easily identify your values and beliefs and see if they are their values and beliefs. And kill me if I'm wrong (or shut up if you don't agree), but shared values and purpose is what makes people follow you and what, subsequently, makes you a leader. Otherwise, we would all be crazy happy with just jobs and just bosses.
Another secret power of humility is serving. A humble leaders see themselves as servants to those below. Do you find it funny? Think about the meaning of the word "leader". By its definition, a leader is someone who goes first and leads by example, someone who will take a risk to go first into the unknown and test it, so that his or her team can then safely follow, someone who will protect his or her team. It is the purest and most genuine form of serving and it is the basis of the we-are-in-it-together mentality. It is humility that makes servant (take a hint!) leadership possible.
The beautiful thing about integrity is not only that it makes you consistent (which in turn makes people trust you!), but also that it makes you a fighter (not the chess boxing one, though). A leader with strong moral principles has a deep-rooted commitment to act accordingly to the principles and hence will fight for these principles and will protect them. It is the integrity that will make a leader stand up for a colleague or an employee (or a boss) who is being wrongly accused of something he or she hasn't done, it is the integrity that will make a leader fight for equal treatment of employees and customers. It is the integrity that will make a leader take the responsibility for actions: their own and the team they are leading (or should I say, serving?). And if that's not leadership, then I don't know what is.
Real leadership cannot exist without compassion, empathy, courage, integrity and humility, because it is compassion, empathy, courage, integrity and humility that makes people trust you. And ONLY when the trust emerges, will people follow you and will they support you and your cause with all their hearts. Without trust you are just a boss, but with trust you are a leader and a model example to follow wholeheartedly.
When leaders aspire to improve their organization's responsiveness to market demands, adapt to change and enhance their operational efficiencies, they often look to how their teams are structured and collaborating. One popular strategy for enhancing collaboration and agility is to create a "matrixed" organization where employees work on multiple teams and report to multiple managers.
Many matrixed employees feel overwhelmed by the onslaught of messages, questions, information requests and meetings with bosses, peers, subordinates and customers. A staggering 45% of highly matrixed workers say they spend most of their day responding to requests from coworkers.4
Rob Cross, professor of global leadership at Babson College, refers to this kind of chaotic work experience as "collaborative overload."5 Cross' research shows that, in many teams and organizations, the most beleaguered people carry a much larger share of the collaboration burden than their colleagues do.6 Their names seem to be plastered to every email and meeting invite.
Cognitive load is the mental effort that a task requires. Workers in highly matrixed organizations wrestle with greater cognitive load because they have more demands to balance -- more bosses, more colleagues on different teams, and sometimes more customers and suppliers.7 And the rise of the global workplace means that more employees work across multiple time zones, which can feel like a never-ending workday.
Employees who work in matrixed organizations often work on larger teams because so many decision-makers and implementers are involved in every project.8,9 This adds even more attention-draining cognitive load to their efforts. Larger teams tend to be more difficult to lead and more frustrating to work on because members devote more time to organizing their work and less time to actually doing it.
Consider the simple act of taking turns in team conversations. The more people in a meeting, the more people who can -- and often will -- offer opinions, advice and questions. That slows everything down, no matter how "agile" an organization may claim to be. Misunderstandings and conflict flare because, as teams get larger, it becomes harder and harder for each member -- including leaders -- to track and respond to the needs of every other member.
Matrixed teams often become laden with clashing and unclear expectations from multiple bosses or teammates, shifting and vague directions about which decisions people do (and do not) have the authority to make, and demands from customers that are impossible to satisfy without displeasing bosses or peers. When employees are working across teams for multiple managers, role conflict and role ambiguity are especially rampant.
Gallup's listening tours have also revealed that in many matrixed organizations, a different -- nearly opposite -- malady arises where important initiatives and solutions fall through the cracks. Everyone agrees that certain projects are important, but no single boss or team takes full responsibility for leading the effort. As a result, many good ideas become the "walking dead" or "orphan problems" -- solutions or initiatives that everyone likes, but nobody is nurturing.
Matrixed teams often become laden with clashing and unclear expectations from multiple bosses or teammates, shifting and vague directions about which decisions people do (and do not) have the authority to make, and demands from customers that are impossible to satisfy without displeasing bosses or peers.
Role conflict and role ambiguity also happen when leaders don't know how to prioritize and clarify expectations. Their intentions to do what is best for the business are good, but often lack decision-making processes, goals and metrics that help them link individual and team goals to what is best for the organization. As a result, people are confused, or don't even consider, "what matters most" and "what success looks like" for the greater good. And, at the same time, they understand, are rewarded for and focus on concrete team and personal priorities.
The first bias, which they deem "partition focus," happens when leaders devote most or all of their attention to dividing up the work. For instance, leaders may focus on building the best teams, functions and specialized units but "neglect" how to cohesively integrate their work.
Matrixed teams were designed to reduce coordination neglect problems. The idea behind having multiple bosses and being a member of multiple interdisciplinary teams was to help employees learn to better collaborate across functions and achieve shared goals.
Unfortunately, in too many matrixed teams, people who identify strongly with a particular silo go through the motions of attending interdisciplinary team meetings while remaining focused on their "component." Or, worse yet, they treat interactions with "outsiders" as battles where their goal is to impose their will on others rather than to collaborate and support them.
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