Where Have All the Leaders Gone?, part 6 of 6

Leadership Role #5: Managing the Action Cycle

When making requests of team members, a leader must set clear expectations and conditions of satisfaction. This allows employees to request the resources they need to fulfill their project commitments. It is then the leader’s responsibility to ensure that these resources (e.g., budget, staffing, and time) are made available.

Poor communication of expectations is a frequent source of breakdown in leadership. When a leader fails to set explicit conditions of satisfaction for a request, his staff may be uncertain about what is required of them. In turn, they will likely fail to make clear requests for resources. If, as a result, the project fails, each side is likely to blame the other, producing a mood of distrust and resentment.

[wcm_restrict]To develop harmony within an organization, leaders must ensure that actions are properly coordinated between different individuals. This points to a key difference between leaders and managers. Management means coordinating the actions of many individuals in order to deliver on the conditions of satisfaction set by the leader. Though leaders often manage certain aspects of teams and projects, when a leader delegates authority, the competence of management is exercised not by the leader but by someone else. When this happens, leaders and managers appear as two different roles in an organization, with different domains of concerns.

Despite the fact that these two roles – leadership and management – can be mutually exclusive, leaders are ultimately responsible for the actions of the whole organization. After all, leaders are responsible for delegating authority, so the results produced by those they empower can ultimately be attributed to them. Final responsibility over the organization’s actions is never delegated.

The most effective tool for this aspect of leadership and management is what we have termed the Action Cycle. This is a body of work that is designed to enable the effective communication, coordination, and collaboration that are the essential competencies of today’s business world. Too much of what we call ‘modern management practices’ are relics of the bygone industrial era. The common wisdom still promotes management as supervision and leadership that gives orders. That worked during the industrial era. It simply doesn’t today.

Today the value generators in any organization are what we call Coordination Workers. These are people who are educated, agile, mobile, and creative. They are problem solvers who generate value through effective coordination with each other. The historical practice of management was designed to be effective with people who were uneducated, unsophisticated, and working out of survival. Coordination workers are not driven by survival; they look for autonomy, mastery, and meaning. And they don’t respond well to management as supervision.

As such, we find a new kind of waste in today’s business – coordination waste. It is much more dangerous than industrial-era wastes, because unlike scrap, inventory, and wasted time and motion, you can’t see coordination waste. Lack of innovation, poor listening skills, poor meeting practices, and miscommunication and miscoordination all produce vast amounts of waste, and none of the historical measures of management can detect them.

The action cycle provides a universal method for minimizing these wastes as it is designed to enable coordination and collaboration while driving wastes out of the organization. Leaders of today and tomorrow need to learn the practices of today and tomorrow and set aside those of yesterday.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Chris Majer, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Human Potential Project, is the author of The Power to Transform: Passion, Power, and Purpose in Daily Life (Rodale), which teaches the strategies corporate, military, and sports leaders have used to positively transform themselves and their organizations in a way readers can adept to their own lives and professions. He may be reached at www.humanpotentialproject.com.