Archiv der Kategorie: Management

Here you find topics like planning, organization and leadership.

Real leaders

Even if the society, the economy or the enterprise are blamed for drawbacks, it is always people, who are creating, not necessarily conscious, negative circumstances. Examples are the leaders. The behavior of highly paid superiors is frequently copied by the employees. Since the fish stinks from the head, the negative properties are mainly conveyed.

  • Missing authority of the boss’s results in long-winded decision making.
  • Postponing decisions paralyses progress.
  • Missing goals create contradictory activities.
  • Blindness and deafness to the feedbacks of the employees result in a loss of confidence.

As a consequence, incongruent leadership style undermines the authority and prevents results.

Führungskraft

The employees are asked in the course of the introduction of Entrepreneurship to think and act like an enterpriser. At the same time the leadership positions are reduced to simple steps on the career ladders. The actual task of management goes in this case by the board. Employees have to fill out the role of an ‚executive’ faster than ever before, without being in the position to develop the following characteristics.

  • Power
    The takeover of a team leader position suggests that thereby the necessary power and sufficient resources are automatically available. On the one hand the purely formal transfer of power is not enough in times of increasing employee participation, in order to exert influence as well as to get acceptance and commitment from the employees. On the other hand the higher leadership levels keep the control of the planning and the budgets. Top managers decide nowadays the smallest activities and expenditures personally. For middle management only remains the title.
  • Decisiveness
    An important function of bosses it is to seize the take decisions that cannot be decided on the subordinated level. In the scope of responsibility goals should be specified that fit within the superordinate frameworks. Additionally, alternatives have to be selected, the application of resources controlled, social conflicts dissolved as well as the fundamental structure of the job positions and the procedures defined. In order to fill out the role, the executives need decisiveness. This requires decisions that are made timely and conclusive.
  • Goals
    The published plans are the basis for the staff and the other participants. The goals must fit into the big picture, but they should leave enough flexibility for the activities of the employees. Therefore the executives must make the overview available that shows the direction to the operational activities. Leaders are the specialists for the political aspects, the control of the area, the availability of the relevant information and for the control of cooperation.
  • Attentiveness
    The most important ability of the top management is the attention that is used to observe the occurrences – particularly the observation of the relationships between the employees, between employees and customers as well as between employees and suppliers. They provide the basis for the improvement measures of co-operation. Since these social aspects mostly happen on an unconscious, subliminal level, it needs a lot of instinct based on experience.
  • Style
    There is not the one, right style of leadership, but different approaches that depend on the country-specific culture, the role models of the enterprise and the personality of the leader. This might be authoritarian, democratic or liberal leadership approaches and/or any mixture of the three. It is crucial that the selected style is constantly used. The employees receive thereby an example for their orientation.

You can see in large companies more and more that the executives have promising titles, but do not show in everyday business the above characteristics. This explains the search for trainings concerning charisma, acceptance and commitment. They should enforce the self-confidence of the responsible people. Unfortunately decisiveness does not evolve, if decisions are always made on the superior levels. The ever more evolving micro management results at the same time in the fact that subordinated executives do not reflect any more about strategy, goals and activities in their responsibility. Since guidance in its actual sense does not take place, the question about the personal style of leadership will one day not appear any more, since the high-level executive is lowered to the role of a messenger of the superordinate levels.

Bottom line: The middle management mutate into highly paid employees, who

  • do not have the previous authority,
  • actually don’t need decisiveness,
  • have modest room for acting,
  • distribute only insensitively orders and
  • do not unfold a personal style.

In principle, these are good basic conditions in order to create lean structures. Unfortunately the enterprises undermine these approaches, by proclaiming flat structures. At the same time they create hierarchies that subordinate one executive to another of the same level. Formally, there will be fewer levels, than expected. The resulting ‘kings without land’, who, without budget and power, are not allowed to make their own decisions, turn into shadows of real leaders.

Micro Management 2.0

No one benefits from a leader, who is taking care of every detail of the business. This so-called Micro Management is common style of leadership. The Micro Manager (MM) can be recognized by the following aspects.

  • He cannot delegate.
  • He is always on the run, has no time and works around the clock.
  • He is interested in every detail.
  • He favors deciding everything by himself.
  • He corrects personally every error, no matter how small they are.
  • … (You surely find some additional attitudes).

This „over-steering” results for the employees in reluctance, work to rule, decreasing quality, regular delegation upward as well as the habit to react instead of acting independently. The whole is reinforced by the possibilities of the Internet and the extensive accessibility through smartphones, iPads and WiFi. This leads to Micro Management 2.0.

Mikromanager2 0

The Micro Manager 2.0 has the additional following properties.

  • Smartphones junkie
    Micro manager 2.0s have their smartphones always in standby. He/she reacts immediately to incoming calls or messages – in the office, a meeting, at lunch, in front of the television, in the restaurant, on the beach or wherever she/he currently is.
  • Smsing, whatsappen and Co.
    The means and ways that you can use today to communicate, are multimedia-based – text, sound and images as well as all combinations, synchronous or asynchronous. This reaches from short messages, to emails, to Skype. 0 are reading and smsing regularly one or two sentences, give direct orders or send a message that they come back later. Emails are essentially passed on with a short comment.
  • CC-supporters
    0s attach importance on being in all emails carbon copied (cc). Although they cannot cope with the resulting flood of information, they want to receive it because they could need the information later. Even so that this is mostly never the case. If the improbable case should happen, they will anyway simply request the latest version.
  • Calendar surfer
    In the Pre-Net age there was no choice for the micro managers than asking the secretary or the room neighbor, where Dick and Harry were. A 0 lives today in paradise, since he can access the calendars of the employees from everywhere. He does not limit himself to check where someone is. No. He asks, when and why not differently and what for at all.
  • Quality assurance
    It becomes particularly labor-intensive for MM2.0s, if they turn into the general quality control of the employees. Are the documents complete, error-free, perfectly bound, with enough copies,…? It starts, when they take over the spell checking. This, of course, can be intensified by checking the calculations of Excel sheets and by revealing all kind of minor flaws.
  • 10hours+Alpha-day
    Understandably the MM2.0s are not able to fulfill all tasks in the context of a normal working day. Even not the chosen expansion of work time to any extent greater than permitted is sufficient to accomplish. Therefore, after maximum 12 months, the MM2.0s are running on empty. They cannot keep up and start overseeing errors. Above all, they do not have time for their actual task – the leadership of their scope of responsibility. At the latest they are now overworked.
  • Thinking out loud
    In the absence of time, MM2.0s cannot provide a documented strategy. Although they have a vision and strategic goals, they are not able to express their ideas in a consistent way. Therefore they always think out loud and proclaim their feelings – either this or that way.
  • Penniless
    The largest deficit of the MM2.0s is the omission to look for sufficiently large budget. Thus, they are often penniless. They activate the official escalation way and the top management has to release of necessary means – or not.
  • Walking question mark
    The backdoor for executives, who do not have time to reflect, is the fully developed ability to respond to questions with a counter question at any time. Even if MM2.0s intervene everywhere, they do not think that they can solve everything – but they believe that they have to.

Bottom line: We suffer with Micro Management 2.0 faster and much more „over-steering”. The available ICT solutions provide more and more mobile and at all time ready systems. They offer unlimited uses to the Micro Managers 2.0. Nobody actually believes that leadership style does not deliver any benefit for the executives, the enterprise or the employees. Nevertheless companies allow that valuable energy is wasted with this approach.