Fiddling with high–quality business models and rocket science mathematics on splendidly built spreadsheets may prove useless if you don’t understand what it is that you do best: manage or lead.
If you do both you might end up becoming one of the 40% or more of new businesses that will fail in 2006.
Management is a bottom-line focus: How can I best accomplish certain things? Leadership deals with the top line: What are the things I want to accomplish?
Stephen Covey, business expert and author
What makes how you approach the topic of management and leadership so compelling is that you have to be honest with 'what it is that you do best'.
Simple as it may sound, it is the easiest way to avoid losing your dream, waking up and having to go and work for someone else.
At first it may be difficult contemplating which side of the fence you may be on or would like to be on, particularly if you’ve had years of working for someone else, living and creating their destiny whilst you were being paid for it.
If this has been the case, or for whatever other reason, take heed of the wise and simple words of Stephen R. Covey:
“Management is a bottom-line focus: How can I best accomplish certain things? Leadership deals with the top line: What are the things I want to accomplish?”
Therefore an important question you may ask as a leader or someone that thinks they may be taking the leadership route is:
“How do I accomplish the things I want, in an ever-increasingly complex and changing world?”
Ronald Heifetz, the director of the Leadership Education Project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in the States says:
“Leaders of the future need to have the stomach for conflict and uncertainty, among their people and within themselves. That’s why leaders of the future need to have an experimental mindset.
"Some decisions will work, some won’t. Some projects will pay off, some won’t. But every decision and every project will teach you and your organisation something about how the world is changing, and about how your company compares with its competition.”
This doesn’t mean that one should test every idea that comes to mind, but to pick what is fundamental and what isn’t and the impact that it will have on the overall organisation, today, tomorrow and in the future.
