People are resources

When you manage, you learn you have a few resources that you always need to keep an eye on: time, materials, money, and people. The problem is, you have to manage people completely differently from how you manage time, materials, and money.

I realize I’ve written on this before, but I really think this is where managers who are otherwise good completely fall down.

People are people not human resources. You manage people. Living, breathing, feeling, imperfect, lovable, exasperating people. People will enliven you, deaden you, excite you, disappoint you, thrill you, and contort you into many different shapes. In short people will have a profound impact on you. As a leader, always remember you are also doing this to them. (Source )

People are people. Their skills are resources. It’s their time you’re managing. They’re unpredictable. They’re feeling. Many of them try their best against next to impossible odds.

You cannot manage people the way you manage everything else. You have to remember that you’re a person, and that the “resource” you’re dealing with is a person, too. They deserve the same respect and application of common sense that you would expect.

You also have to remember that if you continually forget that you’re managing people instead of one more resource, people can find somewhere to go where they’ll be seen as someone who has a lot of relevant skills as opposed to a number on a piece of paper.

Management vs. Leadership

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.- Peter Drucker

The guys over at Slacker Manager are asking what the difference is between management and leadership. Reading over the comments, it seems that no one agrees. For some people, the two are synonymous. For others, there’s a distinct difference.

For me, managing and leading are two different things. Managing is overseeing things, making sure everything is running smoothly, making decisions and changes to keep everything running smoothly. It’s about processes. It’s operational.

Leadership, on the other hand, is an underlying set of governing principles. Where management is often something everyone can put their finger on, leadership is a bit more elusive. You know someone is a bad manager because they aren’t handling resources well. You suspect someone is a bad leader because it feels like the person never really knows where they’re going, and that translates to confusion in the ranks.

Management is a practice. Leadership is a trait.

How to lose a good employee

Everybody is going nuts for the Manager’s Cheat Sheet right now, and it’s not hard to see why. 101 common sense tips, right there for the printing and tacking to your wall for reference! What could be better?

Since everyone seems to be picking a couple and blogging them, I decided I’d pick a couple that reflect what I feel can be the difference between a manager who encourages high turnover and a manager able to retain their employees.

89. Get the facts first. Before you pass judgment on a situation, make sure you have the whole story. Listen to employees and refrain from questioning anyone’s integrity without first ensuring that you’ve gathered all the data.

Because my workplace is what it is, I’ve seen what happens when this one is actually applied. The manager arms themself with the facts, and then can best address the issue, be it a gap in a program, a complaint, whatever. And if the manager is going based on what they see, then it’s imperative to talk to the employees who are actually involved to get all of the information. There may have been something going on the manager couldn’t see from a distance.

I’ve also seen what happens when the manager doesn’t bother to research all of the facts. Nothing destroys your credibility as a manager faster than to tell someone you’re yelling at that you couldn’t be bothered to actually look into what happened. Especially when the situation is one that could be neatly mediated between all concerned parties just by taking a quick look at the facts.

40. Know your subordinates’ jobs. You don’t want to be caught with inferior job knowledge.

Along the same lines, nothing loses an employee’s respect faster that hearing, “I have no clue what you do, but I’m going to tell you how to do your job. You know, the one you normally do just fine.” Learn what people do. Learn how they do it. This puts you in a better position to help the employee out if something comes out, and allows you to be sensitive to their issues.

Amazingly, by knowing what your employees do, it also allows you to match up the right task to the person with the best experience/job scope.

I know I did them out of order, but I just wanted to address them in this order. Just doing these two things can go far in retaining employees, making the manager’s life simpler because training and “ramping up” takes a lot of time and resources.

An aware and alert manager is a good thing.

Self-leadership

I have a great deal of respect for Rosa Say because she so often says so elegantly exactly what needs to be said on a topic.

Recently, she shared her twelve rules for self-leadership, and I think they nicely sum up core practices that can help leaders become great leaders. These twelve rules can help make a leader more authentic in their practices because they are essentially leading by modeling, and it’s been my experience that’s the easiest way to lead any group.

As my quote collection recently reminded me, leadership is action. It’s not a place for “Do as I say, not as I do.” When you act, when you embrace these ideas for leading yourself, you are creating a situation where people can clearly see your vision. They don’t feel conflicted. They might even feel better, not only about your leadership, but also their role in your organization.

Governing yourself, doing what you expect others to do, strengthens your leadership and your credibility.

The difference between management and leadership

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.- Peter Drucker

Just in case you were wondering…

Quotes on leadership, productivity

“Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and action.”
– Harold S. Deneen

“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”
- Abraham Lincoln

“Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”
- Gloria Steinem

A leadership model?

I admittedly have some mixed feelings over this model for educational leadership that I came across right before my computer blew a resistor.

Part of it may have to do that I was given this link amidst a link of different archetypes that I cannot find now.

Part of it may be because I find the descriptions a bit granola at best and a bit broad at worst.

If we actually push past my misgivings, though, these various leadership types are really present in every sector, not just education. In fact, if you’re lucky enough to have a leadership team who blend all of these types together, then I figure you probably would have quite the skilled team ready to encourage the entire team on to greatness.

It bears some reflecting.

A little light leadership reading

I often find the web clips in Gmail to be a bit too intrusive for my taste, but yesterday, they were intrusively intriguing.

One of my coworkers is a high school student trying to finalize her application and scholarship essays, and I’ve been helping her work on them. I also help her with her English papers from time to time. This morning, I had one of each, and the web clips both referred me to leadership-related sites.

I ignored the one tied to the college essay, but the one connected to the English essay led me to a collection of PDFs. I’ve added them to my reading list for the next couple of weeks, and I’m pretty excited. I really ought to send the link to my coworker, because her paper is an attempt to define her vision of leadership, and I think they’d help her sharpen her already sharp views.

Leadership traits

As we barrel on toward November and National Novel Writing Month, I’m watching a disturbing scene play out in my region. The same scene tried to play out in my region last year, but I was the leadership, and I refused to sit there and let it happen.

This year, I decided to take a break from being a leader, hoping to make good use of my free time, not only in writing a new manuscript, but also in completing some other projects that have sat around neglected. Slowly, the worms are making their way out, looking to step up as the new leadership, if not over the entire region, then over one small group within the region.

It’s a bit disturbing to watch because both NaNoWriMo and the region mean so much to me. I know I’ve laid the groundwork to allow a strong, considerate leadership to step up, but I’m a bit concerned about what will happen if they don’t. The factions vying for control only want it so they can either get their way in every argument or so they can walk around and brag about being the leadership.

They aren’t in it for love of NaNoWriMo or love of the region. They’re in it for themselves. It’s been my experience that these type of people never succeed as leadership.

When you choose to step up and take charge of something, you’re saying that you want to see whatever it is succeed. You want to grow it into something people want to be part of. A good leader is someone who is looked up to for his positive traits, someone others want to be around, to work with.

A smart person never takes a leadership role to further their own agenda. They do it because their agenda is the welfare and growth of the group.

Respect is a two-way street

We’ve all seen it happen. A leader demands the respect of his subordinates while treating those same subordinates like they aren’t fit to shine his shoes. I don’t know about anyone else, but I have yet to see someone who leads in this manner be successful.

I have often found myself in charge of groups of volunteers over the past several years, mostly unintentionally. It’s been an interesting experience because when I have deliberately agreed to lead a group of volunteers, many of those who worked with me when I accidentally took charge will ask to work on my team.

When I was younger, I was utterly baffled by this phenomenon. I was even more confused when one of my volunteers, who was preparing to head up a team of volunteers at another event, told me she liked my style and had taken many notes to use when she ran her event.

It’s taken me a lot of time and self-reflection, but I’ve finally figured it out. Actually, that’s not true. Time and self-reflection left me somewhat confused. Watching other leaders around me has proven to be very revealing. I respond best to managers who show me respect; this may actually be because I treat my subordinates with respect.

When a leader treats those around him with respect, strange things happen. People do their work, and strive to do it well. People feel encouraged to come up with better solutions to problems. People feel encouraged to come up with new ideas. People develop their natural abilities to higher levels. The leader himself feels less stress because he has developed an atmosphere where people can do their work without feeling micro-managed.

Think about your own experiences. Which leaders have you thrived under? Did they encourage an atmosphere of mutual respect?