By Arnie Kahn, President, PrintLink March 31, 2006 -- This article continues yesterday’s discussion of the benefits of a strong leadership initiative for your company. 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, yesterday’s article outlined the differences between leadership and management and how these functions are typically divided among the various roles in a printing company. The article also initiated a discussion of the characteristics and functions of leaders, including self-awareness and the ability to work with their own strengths and weaknesses to accomplish the job they are expected to perform. Next, we turn to the numerous assessment tools that 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 (high task, low relationship): Autocratic, task- and schedule-oriented leaders who leave little or no room for cooperation, collaboration, creativity, or debate. When something goes wrong, they tend to focus on casting blame rather than analyzing the problem and how to prevent it. Team Leader (high task, high relationship): People who lead by positive example and foster a team environment in which all members can form mutual bonds and achieve their goals and highest potential as effectively as possible. Normally these types develop and lead some of the most productive teams. Country Club Leader (low task, high relationship): Leaders who predominantly use rewards to maintain discipline and encourage team accomplishments. Typically these types avoid other means of exercising power for fear of jeopardizing their relationships with team members. Impoverished Leader (low task, low relationship): These leaders exhibit a “delegate-and-disappear” style, essentially allowing the team to do whatever it wants. Potentially, they leave other team members vulnerable to a series of power struggles in the absence of consensus. An alternative system, Bolman & Deal’s Four Framework Approach, classifies leaders into four different types based on their styles of behavior. Each type can manifest itself either effectively or ineffectively. Briefly stated: In the Structural Framework, an effective leader is a social architect who works by analysis, design, structure, strategy, experiment, and adaptation, while an ineffective leader is a petty tyrant obsessed with details. In the Human Resource Framework, an effective leader is a servant and catalyst who supports, advocates, and empowers—someone who believes in people and can communicate that belief. He or she is visible, accessible, shares information, fosters participation and moves decision-making down into the organization. An ineffective leader is a pushover or fraud who relinquishes power and responsibility to others. In the Political Framework, effective leaders clarify what they want, assess conflicting interests and power balances, then build coalitions to other stakeholders, primarily through persuasion and advocacy. Ineffective leaders tend to be hustlers who manipulate to get results. In the Symbolic Framework, effective leaders are prophets who achieve by inspiring others and view organizations as stages on which to play certain roles. They use symbols to capture attention and communicate a vision. Ineffective leaders are fanatics or fools who resort to smoke and mirrors. The purpose and beauty of these classification systems is not that leaders can pigeonhole themselves rigidly according to a certain type or types. Rather, it is first to help them understand their natural tendencies and preferred approaches better, and second to make them aware of other leadership styles and possibilities, because a single approach to leadership alone would be inadequate for all situations. For example, while Authoritarian and Impoverished leadership styles might sound too extreme for general use, acting as an Authoritarian Leader might be useful to instill a sense of discipline in an unmotivated worker. Similarly, exhibiting an Impoverished leadership style might help to build a team’s self-reliance. Drive for professional development Another personality trait of effective leaders and managers is their commitment to continual professional development both for themselves and their staff. Just one aspect of this outlook is making sure the people they promote into leadership or management roles have the tools necessary to achieve success. Especially in internal promotions, new managers frequently struggle to balance old relationships to co-workers with new responsibilities, and it often proves to be a tough challenge. Without appropriate tools, they are being set up to fail—and fail they will. Those tools can consist of training or mentoring, a set of management and measurement aids that are utilized company wide, a forum for leadership team interaction, or the many educational programs and self-study books available throughout North America. The essential skills that form the basis of leadership and management training are far too numerous to mention. They include everything from defining and managing priorities, statistics and measurement, and strategic and financial planning to continuous improvement, problem-solving, and of course the all-important handling of human resources. People skills Management’s role is to oversee people and process, not work. The people and the process ultimately achieve the work. And although leadership is often equated with mechanical objectives, strategy, and execution, management’s ability to deal effectively with budgetary considerations and the staff of the organization is what actually absorbs the most time and is the most essential to achieving results. This means the ability to build and lead or manage a high-performance leadership team and a highly productive organizational culture that makes things happen and enables others to get their jobs done effectively, efficiently, and profitably. Among the elements required to achieve these aims are setting appropriate expectations and goals, mobilizing and coaching people to do the necessary tasks required, and guiding their performance. Team building and effective delegation Effective teamwork and delegation don’t mean giving every person, every idea, and every interest equal support. Rather, they require treating all staff with equal respect but different expectations for each one based on individual performance, not idealistic beliefs. Managing people properly involves understanding the strengths and weaknesses of individuals within a work team and assigning people tasks for optimal efficiency—just as on a construction site, it would be bad management to have a carpenter and an electrician do one another’s jobs. Good managers put people in positions best suited to their skills. The power of persuasion One of the most important traits of effective leaders and managers is the ability to get people to work hard for them. This goal can never be effectively accomplished by haggling, cajoling, begging, bribing, bullying, or using any kind of force to gain cooperation. Rather, the single most compelling motivation for people to work and think at their highest levels of performance is the desire to accomplish a worthwhile task. Thus the single most important skill of leaders and managers is persuasion—the ability to persuade other people to embrace their ideas as valuable and work to achieve them, even in the face of adversity. Great leaders and managers create a compelling, inspiring vision and communicate it with passion. In doing so, they often employ such other advanced communication skills as focusing on the interest and concerns of their audience, summarizing their ideas into simple terms that can be communicated easily, and presenting their case clearly. They are also perceived as powerful communicators because they tend to listen more than they speak. Leading by example Some of the best managers we’ve seen at PrintLink are those that lead by example. By investing themselves in being a good role model for their employees, they ensure staff not only hear what they are expected to do, but also see it in action. Management by walking around We’ve said it before, but as an effective leadership technique nothing can replace “management by walking around.” It is an essential way for managers to elevate their visibility and participation in the day-to-day business, and to promote an open-door policy for vital two-way communication. Gone the way of the dinosaurs are isolated, corner-office managers—the ones someone from the ranks once referred to as “the carpet people” who never set foot on the shop floor. Leadership equals trust In general at PrintLink we are seeing a greater focus in the printing industry on management and supervisory positions—recognizing both the huge importance to a company of managing people and process effectively and also the importance of hiring the right people for the job. More and more companies are looking for leadership abilities at all levels specific to their business. But some have actually starting sourcing candidates outside the printing industry for the very senior roles because they feel that at this point the industry falls short of developing people with those skills. Hence the dire need for printing companies to provide continual professional development both for their new and veteran management. The most important thing companies have to sell is trust. After all, despite all the available proofing options, print-and-communications solutions are still products you can’t see until it is too late. And since ours has universally become a just-in-time industry, absolutely no margin remains for error. More than ever before, buyers of your services need to be able to trust that you as their service provider will ultimately deliver. And their trust cannot be restricted just to your sales rep who calls on them. It must extend to the whole structure behind the sales rep that plans, produces and delivers the product. The trust model must be turned inward on the company as well to build a strong team that practices what it preaches. If you think of the pressroom as the customer of the prepress department or the bindery as the customer of the pressroom, it becomes clear that the entire company is comprised of its own internal customer-supplier relationships that prosper from a high level of mutual trust. That kind of shared confidence only comes from a team directed by strong managers and leaders. And it returns full circle to achieve the ultimate objective of customer trust for your organization.