There is a lot of focus on good and modern leadership today. In many organisations, large resources are invested in leadership development. Most organisations also understand that Management and Leadership are unique skills, but what does that mean?
To clarify the role of a leader, we start by looking at four basic parts:
- Management - What's the goal and get a clear picture of your organisation's mission.
- Leadership - The ability to get employees to move towards the goal and accomplish the task.
- Coordination - Ensure the device has a clear starting point and fits into the organisation.
- Competency development - Ensure and develop the skills, for themselves and their employees, required to do the job.
A good start to good leadership is to create and maintain a balance between these four parts.
Decision and decision rights
A functioning structure ensures that the manager has the opportunity to exercise leadership and focus on all the above points. A company that has a well-functioning management system allows the leader to make decisions.
Decision-making power belongs to a leader who is accountable, understands the goal and mission, and has clear authority to exercise their right to decide.
But even if the organisation has ensured through structures that the right decisions are part of the leadership role, it is not a given that the leader has any decision-making power. Having decision-making power means that the leader dares and can explain their decision. In other words, when the leader makes a decision, the decision is made.
When the manager gets stuck in the operational work
Delegating is an art, and the inability to delegate leaves many managers stuck in operational work. This can mean that the manager is doing the employee's work or trying to find solutions to operational problems. This doesn't lead to leadership and means that the overview of coordination is lost when the manager tries to solve operational problems. Often the manager solves them worse than the employees themselves. Problem solving in the organisation can usually be delegated.
A manager who works too much on operational issues and less on leadership should be given tools to hand over more responsibility to employees.
How do you delegate?
By asking the employee to answer five questions, the employee will help solve problems and the manager will have time to exercise leadership instead of being a problem solver. Most problems can be solved if the right person takes care of it.
When the problem arises, the employee can answer these five questions:
1. What is the problem?
2. What are the consequences?
3. How did it take place?
4. What solutions are there?
5. Which solution do you prefer?
Unravelling a problem can be a challenge. Many times we start looking for the solution to the problem before we know the root of it. When analysing problems, we need to sit down and ask probing questions.
Examples of questions are:
- What concerns you about this area?
- What are the circumstances?
- What do we gain in this situation?
- What does it cost us to be in this situation?
- Are we causing the situation ourselves?
- In what way do we allow the situation?
These questions are not primarily to find a solution, but to look at the problem with new perspectives and gain new insights.
We rarely focus on the symptoms of big problems. This means that the problem that causes new problems remains. For example, when water drips from the roof, do we find a bucket and stop the water from landing on the floor, or do we patch the hole in the roof correctly?
One of the tools used for problem solving is simple and gives us a deeper understanding of what our challenges look like. By asking the question "why" 5 times, we have a better chance of solving the real problem and not just the symptoms it brings.
Extended DISC and management
The Extended DISC Leader Profile is one of our most widely used tools and has helped thousands of leaders around the world. It is used for self-exploration and to find out what exactly the leader needs to use their decision-making power for, what motivates and what types of decisions take more or less energy.
By increasing our self-awareness, it gives us the key to developing our confidence and self-belief, which is all that is needed to develop decision-making power.
The Leader Profile effectively describes how you can better communicate, influence and motivate others to be important to succeed as a leader.
Interacting with other people can sometimes require effort. We don't understand what the other person means, what they really want or what their intentions are. We can have the best intentions, but things still go wrong.
For this purpose, we recommend a Colleague Profile, where you will be very clear about the areas of communication and motivation where you are different and similar.
If you are interested in hearing more, contact us today.
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