Schlagwort-Archiv: Leadership

Lonely leaders – soloists without impact

Some managers hamper progress in the enterprise with their avalanche-like excessive desire for action, when they do not pay attention to the feedback of their employees. They always run with new ideas ahead of the staff without completing anything. Half-done initiatives and a large number of demoralized employees remain. The successors have no other choice than to repair the damage – again and again. And this happens although the leaders should have noticed that they are only soloists without impact, if they do not have the support of the staff.

Sollerfüllung

Especially in the areas of service and administration, where no physical products are created, the commitment of the persons employed is the basis for good performances. Results that are difficult to measure, like the relationship with the customers, the appropriate application of resources and the consistent external representation of the corporate values, are critical, if a manager does not consider the ideas of the staff. How can you avoid losing your employees during your day-to-day work?

  • Listening
    Those bosses, who practice active listening within respective meetings (e.g. town halls, round tables), take thereby the foot off the brake. In return they receive the insights and the opinions of the employees, who eventually improve the results and the balance sheet of the boss.
  • Agreeing upon obligation AND freestyle
    Goals create the framework, in which the employees act. In general the targets describe, what the employees have to do. Additionally the goals should also be fixed. It enables the employees to provide additional personal contributions. That way dedication becomes again worthwhile. Beyond that the superiors get additional possible use from the extra abilities of the employees.
  • Service level Agreements (SLAs)
    With external service providers it has paid off to agree upon the deliverables, the response time and the speed with SLAs. The description of the required quality prevents a halfhearted target fulfillment. The thresholds are specified for the particular case to be processed and can be subsequently evaluated for defined periods. In such a way the service level becomes a seizable component of the goal agreement.
  • The open checklist
    Checklists examine the fulfillment of the essential aspects of a task. The task fulfillment becomes as good as the prepared checklist. With the classical checklist you get only a target fulfillment.
    Item 1? Checked off.
    Item 2? Checked off.
    Item 3? Checked off.
    Patient dead.With an open checklist that does not only contain of Yes/No questions, but also asks open key questions (like who, where, when, how), the work to rule is prevented.
    Which deliverables were accomplished?
    What characterizes the customer?
    What did we learn?
    What should we avoid?The customers will notice the difference immediately.
  • Sharing responsibility
    The strongest weapon against inner resignation is the joint definition of the basis of daily work. The employees specify the requirements and goals for the respective period in a joint discussion together with the managers. Self-defined and comprehensible goals are pursued more active by the employees and supply the bosses with a better overview, than abstract, hardly seizable agreements.

Bottom line: Superiors, who do not integrate their employees into their leadership, will have difficulties in the future. They lose the people through

  • their inner resignation,
  • the work to rule and
  • the target fulfillment.

Those leaders harm themselves. In the mid-term nobody wants to work for them. The lonely leader, who believes that he knows and can do everything and does not pay attention to the feedback of the employees, becomes over time nothing else but a soloist without impact.

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.