Leadership Post : Management and Intergenerational Leadership Coaching, Employee Engagement, and Performance Management Training

“Better Ideas Through Failure,” is the title of an article in a recent Wall Street Journal. Those of us in human resources have known for years that people can learn from mistakes and that innovation comes from taking risks and making mistakes. Yet when someone does make a mistake they are made to feel bad rather than patted on the back for trying.

I agree with Judy Estrin, a founder of seven high tech companies and author of a book on innovation when she says, “Failure, and how companies deal with failure, is a very big part of innovation.” I’m happy to see that companies such as Grey New York are handing out “Heroic Failure” awards to employees who try something that was worth trying and fail and learn from their failure.

For Baby Boomers like myself, trying something new was not encouraged – in school, especially Catholic school, or in the workplace. If you made a mistake it was usually the blame game rather than owning up to it.

For me, the younger generation – the Millennials and those coming up behind them – have learned to embrace failure from the day they were given their first computer or iPhone on which they could play games. James Gee, a professor at Arizona State University believes that a well-designed game allows players to explore and try new things. In fact, as Gee says, “in a game, failure is a good thing.”

Organizations could learn from playing games and lower the cost of failure and encourage employees to explore and play with ideas. To quote Gee once again, “that type of learning – risk taking – can’t happen if the cost of failure is too high.” So, corporate America, perhaps it’s time to starting playing games!

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“If you want to be incrementally better: Be competitive. If you want to be exponentially better: Be Cooperative.”                                                                                   - Unknown

A client recently raised the question of how a company’s culture can shift from being highly competitive internally to being more collaborative without taking away the competitive “edge” which has helped with their success in the marketplace.

An interesting question and one for which I didn’t have an answer at the time. It intrigued me enough to spend time reflecting on it and, I think, coming up with a reasonable response.

Collaboration according to Webster means to share, work with one another, cooperate and assist. While to compete means to outdo one another for acknowledgement, a prize, supremacy, or engage in a contest to compete in business.

In my opinion you can do both successfully because the end goal is the same - to innovate and strive to be the best through competition and to collaborate by working in a competitive way in order to innovate and be the best.

How To Do Both

Allow Risk Taking

Encourage friendly collaborative competition amongst employees and allow them to take risks and make mistakes. Use mistakes as “teachable moments” rather than penalize employees for trying something new.

Hold Employees Accountable and Reward Them

Collaboration doesn’t stand a chance when employees have separate agendas. To prevent that, hold employees accountable and reward them for collaborative behaviors.

Introduce Corporate Social Networks

Use corporate social networks to encourage collaboration and foster innovation. Forward thinking companies such as Microsoft, Qualcomm, Booze Allen and Agilent all use social media tools such as messaging, wikis, blogs, etc. to encourage communities of sharing and learning.

According to Jane Hart, CEO for the Center for Learning and Performance Technologies, “Christopher Goh, Agilent’s director of global learning and leadership development, believes leveraging on such social networks allows his company to ‘facilitate collaborative learning and knowledge sharing’ amongst its employees, especially the younger generation. “

So, yes I believe you can collaborate and yet continue to compete.

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The words management and leadership are often used interchangeable, which makes me crazy. For starters, they aren’t. They are similar, yet different and it’s important to understand the difference for 3 reasons:

1. To clarify roles and responsibilities

Knowing and understanding the difference will help managers and leaders get clarity about what is expected of them so they can be successful in their positions.

 2. Help managers successfully transition to leadership positions

Many managers, when they transition into a leadership role, continue to manage.  Why? They simply don’t understand the difference. So, we have a lot of leaders who continue to manage and not lead. To quote John Kotter, author and Harvard Business School Professor, “most U.S. corporations today are over managed and under led.”

3. To build a leadership pipeline

Understanding the fundamental differences can help a company give potential leadership candidates the exposure and developmental experiences they need to prepare them to assume leadership positions.

So, now that we know the WHY, let’s look at the WHAT.

A Closer Look At Management and Leadership

According to Kotter, management promotes stability and copes with complexity and leaders press for and cope with change. One is not better than the other as both are necessary for success.

Management and leadership both involve what needs to be done, finding the right people to do what needs to be done and then finally ensuring that it gets done. Although complementary, they each go about doing things in different ways.

A Look At How They Differ

Management

Management’s focus is on complexity and avoiding chaos by putting things in order. Management does this by developing a plan with an accompanying budget that is in line with the goals of senior management. Their plan is usually short term – a year at most – and outlines specific objectives, due dates and steps to take along the way.

To support the plan, management creates an organizational structure and begins staffing it with qualified people. During this time, managers delegate tasks, coach and develop their people and handle anything having to do with the day-to-day management issues.

Finally, management focuses on controlling and problem solving. They monitor the results of their plan by way of reports, meetings and dealing with problems as they arise. Their ultimate goal is to support leadership.

Leadership

Leadership, on the other hand, begins by setting a direction and developing a vision for the distant future. Leadership is much more strategic and looks toward what could be.

Next, leaders focus on aligning the right people against their vision. They must ensure that they clearly communicate their vision and that it is understood and that people are committed to it.

Finally, motivate and inspire people to ensure their continued commitment to the vision and making sure obstacles don’t get in the way of achieving their goal.

We Need More Leaders

Suffice it to say, that there is a need – even though we are in an economic downturn - for more leaders. Companies need to “walk the talk” and really focus on developing talent by implementing an integrated talent management process.

At the same time, they should keep in mind a warning from John Kotter - that strong leadership with weak management is not good and is sometimes actually worse than the reverse. Kotter fells the real challenge is to combine strong leadership and strong management and use each to balance the other.

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