By Arnie Kahn, President, PrintLink March 30, 2006 -- Does the following script from a recent advertisement sound like your company? 1st employee: Did you hear the news? Our president just left the company and took all our vice presidents with him. 2nd employee: We still have lots of ink for our computer printers. 1st employee: What difference does that make? 2nd employee: Well, which one do you think we’re going to miss first? Would your company miss its printer ink more than its executives? If so, the company is losing out badly on the substantial advantages that effective leadership provides. PrintLink’s staffing placements at printing companies throughout the United States and Canada regularly confirm the benefits of a strong leadership initiative. And as a hiring manager, the clearer your understanding of capable leadership, the greater your insight into the best people to hire and the roles you need them to fill. Accordingly, this article, and part two to follow tomorrow, will outline some of leadership’s characteristics, functions, and contributions to a company. Leadership versus management Although at all levels leadership and management roles often overlap, they are technically distinct. A time-honored aphorism that sums up the difference between them is: “Leadership is doing the right things; management is doing things right.” Leaders decide on the best course of action to reach a desired goal. Like the lead dog on a sled team, they guide from a directional and strategic perspective. By contrast, management looks at the direction established by leadership and says, “Okay, here’s the best way to achieve it.” As an example, consider the construction of a new road. Before construction begins, the leader ensures that the road is necessary and goes in the right direction; then the leader monitors conditions during and after construction to ensure the road remains viable. By contrast, the manager develops and manages a budget and deploys all the construction workers, machinery and tools together in the most efficient way possible to physically build the road. Generally, at the senior level, leaders focus on the outside world and the larger picture, forge strategies and decisions, then distill them into an organizational plan. Managers, on the other hand, focus inward on the organization and deploy its staff and resources to meet that plan in the most effective way. A directional leadership dynamic also occurs at various lower levels of an organization related to workflow. For example, a team leader in the prepress department is a senior operator designated as the go-to person for technical or procedural expertise. Understanding the difference between leadership and management roles can make a workplace considerably more productive. “Seven-Habits” sage Stephen Covey tells of one corporate CEO who spent a huge percentage of his time managing his company’s day-to-day operations—that is, until he learned the definition of leadership. Afterwards, he left the task of optimizing production efficiency and profitability to his managers and began concentrating on leadership. He devoted himself instead to examining trends and statistics, discovering what his company should be doing to stay competitive down the road, and setting strategic goals. As a result, his company’s profits rose more than 50% within a year. Layers of leadership and management Investment in defining, hiring, and training a strong leadership team and the layers of management that are valid for your company will very quickly demonstrate a measurable return. Layers of leadership often comprise the following list (in descending order): • Senior officers (CEO, CFO, COO, President, GM) • Senior managers (Director or VP—operations, manufacturing, sales) • Middle managers (Managers—sales, customer service, accounting, IT, production, prepress, plant, maintenance, shipping & receiving) • Supervisors (all departments, each shift) • Team leaders (hands-on, go-to people who report to Supervisors or Managers) Recent business studies show that the success of a company can be directly linked to the strength of its middle management. A CEO’s effectiveness lies in recognizing this fact and empowering a strong team of subordinates. The layers of that team correlate directly to the size and complexity of the operation, so in a smaller operation more than one of the above layers sometimes become fused into a single job. Characteristics and functions of leaders The importance of selecting the right people to fill roles as leaders and managers is enormous. A manager is not necessarily a leader and vice versa. And just because someone is an expert does not mean he or she can fill either role effectively. Although technical proficiency often counts highly to enable leaders to manage processes, there are certain personality traits and capacities that will prove even more essential in determining their success. These include: Self-awareness Self-awareness is essential for strong, effective leaders and managers, because how they influence others derives from their individual values, perspective, and personality. No specific personality type or leadership style is necessarily better than another. However, all leaders and managers owe it to the company and the people they guide to be clear about what they are doing and what they are good at. Therefore, it is absolutely vital that they take an in-depth, honest look at who they are, their strengths and weaknesses, their values and convictions, and how they interact with others. Leadership cannot exist in isolation; it always needs to be clearly tied to the needs of the company. Therefore, the purpose of having leaders take inventory of themselves is to compare the results to the jobs they are expected to perform. This kind of careful analysis is especially crucial in cases where no one else is going to evaluate their role against their competencies and the needs of the organization, and recommend changes that would benefit the company (and the individual). The self-analysis can shed light on where to delegate tasks for which they have no talent to someone else who does, or help identify gaps where they need to acquire additional skills. The ultimate goal is to achieve peak performance from both the company and themselves. And because circumstances and roles continually change, leaders and managers need to go through the process of self-evaluation not once, but many times throughout their careers. Numerous assessment tools exist to assist leaders and mangers in determining their natural strengths and tendencies. The Gallup Strength Profile and Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator are two classics. Another one, Blake & Mouton’s Managerial Grid, classifies leaders according to their relative concern for tasks versus their concern for people, and identifies four basic types: Authoritarian Leader, Team Leader, Country Club Leader, Impoverished Leader. The dynamics of leadership are critical to success everywhere—a country, a sports team, a family, an industry, a company. In general we are seeing a greater focus in the printing industry on developing and deploying strong leadership and management teams. Because those dynamics are so worthy of consideration, PrintLink’s next article in Expert Row will be devoted to this topic as well. Tomorrow, Part 2 will define the classifications mentioned above—and more.