It stands to reason that the more senior the executive, the more time should be focused on leadership activities verses those of management. Yet without exception, the experience of this group was the reverse, with the highest percentage of time devoted to management activities.

This is not the first time we have encountered this with senior leaders, executives and managers. Which raises these questions:

• What contributes to today’s over-emphasis on management at the expense of leadership?
• What can senior leaders do about it?

A clue comes from further down in the organisation where people mostly say they lack a clear and vivid picture of the destination, how their role contributes to that picture and the outcomes required from them. What people are looking for is more than a vision. It is something concrete they can use to guide their thinking, activities and behaviours. Together with an understanding of ‘why’.

Lack of clarity in a concrete direction not only challenges a manager’s ability to drive participative goal setting, but also makes it impossible for individual, team and business unit goals to align with the organisation’s goals.

This in turn makes it impossible to accurately anticipate and allocate resources (people, time, money and materials), negotiate clear accountabilities and assign the required authority levels people need to act independently.

This is frustrating for managers and their people.

• Managers may procrastinate, resulting in lost time, rework and decisions pushed up to higher level management.
• People may feel their initiative stifled, which creates dependence on those in more senior leadership roles. In some circumstances, people even avoid taking action because they believe the risk is too high.

Ultimately, without an effective balance of leadership and management, both managers and people lose motivation. Their job satisfaction drops, constraining their productivity and hobbling innovation.

Are you over-managing and under-leading? Talk to us at Vivente to help you figure out another way.

We know from Dr. David Rock and others’ research (www.blog.davidrock.net) that neurologically a number of things occur. In response to threat:

• The desire to move away from threat is many times stronger than the desire to move towards a positive or rewarding situation.
• Attention is magnified and easily triggers the fight-flight response.

When this happens, our field of view, creativity, listening, memory, insight and decision-making all reduce under the “pressure of now”. We actually see less information even though we think we are seeing more. Under stress (threat) the noise around us increases which splits and diverts our focus and thinking, causing us to respond by multitasking in an endeavour to reduce the threat.

So what can a leader do?  Dr. Trisha Stratford from the Department of Medial and Molecular Biosciences, University of Technology, Sydney, has some simple and practical solutions.

1. It’s a myth that anyone can multitask well.  Our brain cannot.  So FOCUS ON DOING ONE THING AT A TIME. Prioritisation, sequencing and timing become the keys to reducing stress.
2. Stop and slow down your thinking 3-4 times a day.  That’s it, nothing complex.  Find those 10- to 15-minute spaces across your day to attend to your thinking and slow it down.  What happens? Increased focus and clarity.

Try it and let us know the result.

When cost pressures increase, leaders can become almost exclusively task focused, at the expense of supporting and enlisting the commitment and contribution of the very people they need.

So if reducing cost does mean reducing people, then how important is it that the leadership team sees this as a strategic decision and not just a cost-reduction exercise?  Leaders need to be cognisant that even a perceived tiny threat can have significant impact on their people. (Rock 2008)

Reducing staff requires careful planning because when markets turn, and they will, companies find recovery is delayed because they no longer have the right talent in place to enable them to adapt and respond quickly to emerging opportunities.

Think carefully, not just about immediate needs, but about what knowledge, skills and experience do you need to retain and grow to set you up for the future!

When organisations are under pressure, it’s the messages sent by those with authority and influence about what’s expected that are even more critical. It’s not just what is said by leaders, but also how it is said. Their body language and the leader’s visibility all send a message about how people are expected to behave. Across all organisations, leaders’ actions are watched closely; ‘everything is examined, becomes water cooler stories, and ultimately folklore’ says Sara Mathew, CEO of Dun and Bradstreet (www.blog.davidrock.net).

Which means right now, leaders need to place particular emphasis on their communication – language, message content, positioning of the message, channels to reach people, timing and who delivers the message.

What’s the key to setting the right context and expectations across the whole organisation?
How aware are you of how you deliver your key messages? How do you know how they have been heard? Mathew suggests that ongoing learning, being open to feedback, being self-aware and then modifying behaviour is the ticket. And this is where Vivente can help. –Call us.

Twenty-five years ago, the role of manager was all about creating stability through planning, organising and controlling. Managers worked from a psychological contract of loyalty with employees.

The early 90’s brought leadership into prominence because management alone did not seem to be driving enough change and innovation.

In our view, Leadership and Management today are different yet complementary—both inextricably linked as they drive towards the same outcomes: results, business performance and sustainability.

So what is the difference? You’ll find good answers at www.marcusbuckingham.com and here’s a quick summary.

Management is about driving productivity within the organisation. A manager’s focus needs to be on how to turn the talent of each individual into performance.

Effective managers daily ask themselves:

• Do the people for whom I am accountable have the opportunity to do what they do best every single day they are at work?
• Does each person know specifically what’s expected of them in their role?
• Is every person committed to delivering quality outcomes?

Leadership on the other hand is about being able to reach every person in the organisation in ways that engage their hearts and minds to want to take action that supports moving the company towards a better future. To achieve this requires the ability to envision a tangible and believable future, and be able to lead change and innovation.

The challenge for leaders today is setting a definitive direction amid a sea of rapid change, ambiguity and uncertainty.

Three questions a leader needs to ask are:

• Who do we serve and what certainty do we have that we are serving them in ways that meet their needs?
• What are our core strengths and are we doing everything to fully capitalise on them?
• What is our core score and does every person in our company know the part they have to play in contributing to our score?

Much continues to be written about leadership. But spare a thought for management. Both are necessary for business sustainability. Businesses today needs the leader’s vision to guide change and innovation but little happens without the skill of managersto drive productivity to execute and deliver the required outcomes.

What’s the right leadership /management balance for you in your role?

One of the profound differences between adult males and females emanates from two emotional systems that work simultaneously:

• The temporal-parietal junction system (TPJ) and
• The mirror-neuron system (MNS)

In males, the TPJ strengthens the ability to cognitively and analytically find a solution, an ability called ‘cognitive empathy’. Once a solution is found, the male cortex flashes with excitement: victory! The TPJ keeps a firm boundary between the emotions of ‘the self’ and ‘the other’. The MNS, which governs emotional empathy, activates only fleetingly in men, which causes them to miss emotional cues like tone of voice and facial expressions.

Females use and rely more on the MNS. This strengthens their emotional empathy and enables them to be acutely aware of the emotional responses of others. Females are able to read non-verbal cues for emotional nuances, such as others’ facial expressions, minute muscle movements and breathing. They are acutely aware of incongruities between what is said and tone of voice. As a result, females can identify and anticipate feelings in others and quickly develop emotional congruence with other females. The female brain stays in the MNS longer than a male brain, which causes a woman to want and need to spend more time talking about her emotions.

At Viventé, we see these neurohormonal differences play out frequently in issues of management and leadership. For example, in our Mentoring Programs for Women, male and female mentors approach their mentoring role very differently. Male mentors are often confused to discover that what women mentees really want is to talk through their challenges and feelings before they arrive at a solution, which is generally their own. Yet this behaviour is perfectly consistent with the ‘nature’ of the female neurohormonal system.

Does this perspective give you insight into the difference in leadership behaviours described in our previous blog posts, “What do Women in Leadership add?” and “How do Women in Leadership add Sustainability?” Or do you think differences in style between men and women in leadership are better explained by socialization and society’s expectations of gender and of social role?

Viventé has been setting up and conducting mentoring programs for women in leadership for the past seven years. While mentoring offers an obvious way for female mentees to advance, the side benefits for their male mentors can be significant.  Through the open and confidential conversations that happen between mentor and mentee as she works through the barriers to her advancement, the mentor begins to get closer to what is really happening as he learns from his mentee.  What he learns can then impact his own business unit or organistion.

Success in using mentoring to engage men in the agenda comes when a contemporary approach to mentoring is adopted; it is not about cloning the female leaders to be like men.

Mentoring is a small step, but it starts to move the needle.

But there’s likely to be an unintended downside. In too many cases, it proves not to be an achievement at all. That’s because, outnumbered, the lone woman tends to be ignored by men and the dominant cultural paradigm continues to prevail. Further, it is her gender rather than her competence that is noticed.

No matter how compelling the reasons, it’s important not to divide your small number of women leaders among many teams in the interests of introducing diversity to them all. The key is to ensure a critical mass of women as role models in executive positions to head off problems that come with tokenism. The women’s competence will be noticed and will count rather than their identities as women.

Often in our work, we hear executives genuinely and proudly describe their values of meritocracy as evidenced in their performance criteria, how they select for roles and how they manage their talent pool.

Yet are these decisions based on data or on perceptions and opinions?  Who decides who is in the talent pool and who is not? And hence who benefits from development opportunities and enriching job experiences? 

Our experience at Viventé has shown the importance of taking a good hard look at the systemic issues at play in your organisation, rather than deciding too quickly that it is the women themselves who are not ‘making it’.

Part of the answer lies in the fact that, while women do tend to keep up with their contacts and facilitate new ones, the purpose of their networks remains primarily social and
it is mostly with other women. Time and again, women tell us they’re not comfortable ‘asking for something’ if they feel they don’t have anything to give in return.  So they don’t leverage the power of their networks for their advancement.

The benefit comes when women learn to invest in those contacts who are likely to be of value to them in building an advocacy base.  Learn more about this critical skill from the Viventé Pathways2Leadership™: Networking and Connecting Module.