That’s a nice quote and observation from Eddie Obeng.

One of the challenges I’ve wrestled with in information quality and governance projects has been that most of the people I’ve had to steward on projects have not been accountable to me but I’ve been accountable for the project.

That’s were I really saw the difference between project management and project leadership. Basic management of tasks didn’t deliver the projects – building a team ethos and focus (leadership) made everyone work almost independently towards the same goal… and projects got delivered quickly. Of course, as project manager I was like the proverbial duck, calm and serene on the surface but paddling hard below the waterline to make sure that the management didn’t get lost in the leadership.

Managers get things done because they (or the “hand of god”) says they should be done. Leaders get things done because they make everyone want to do it. The real genius (in my opinion) is balancing the two.

It reminded me of a book I read; Perfect Projects by Eddie Obeng. Writing about leadership he surmises that ‘you can only manage people you have authority over, but you can lead anyone’

He observes that managers on the whole are appointed by other managers. Other people choosing to follow a person makes them a leader.

Actually just been reading this http://www.chrisbrogan.com/what-nine-inch-nails-knows-about-tribes/ by Chris Brogan and it strikes a similar chord, we’re so often surrounded by mediocre managers but true leaders of motivated tribes are few and far between.

If you read about the big Lean implementations that have really worked well, they’re always driven by passionate leaders who throw caution to the wind and refuse to accept blockading and obstacles.

If only IQ was as “sexy” as BI in the boardroom…

I remember that meeting well. At least one of us was crying into their coffee afterwards.

I think that you might be a little extreme in your view that corporate culture and unions are “petty”, but I agree that leadership that brings about real change often has to shake the status quo that corporate culture and “vested interests” like to have maintained.

My view is that the leader of tomorrow (and I mean quite literally the day after today because the challenges are that great) needs to be able to communicate the shared objective and vision well enough that the various interests can be aligned towards it…

The organisation we both worked for had (and still has) a dysfunctional culture where people were encouraged to avoid making hard choices in case they were wrong. In other words… to manage, not to lead. Anything “new” had to be very carefully and diligently sold, and even at that it had to be sold by someone with some top-down authority.

Leadership in an environment like that is tough and any success is often precarious.

Increased virtualisation of teams, and the related issue of multiculturalism (how do you norm a team where 1 is in India, another in Ukraine, another in Iowa?), – at least in my view – means that leaders will need to be more reliant on clarity of goal and objective rather than relying on “social short-hand” alone to motivate people. Technology can help manage tasks, but leadership towards objectives is the real challenge.

Very interesting post indeed and I remember we had a conversation on leadership, or lack of it after one of the major compliance steering meetings when we worked together.

If I should pick one aspect of leadership that interests me most is how leaders are going to be shaped in the years to come. More often than ever before, future leaders will made decisions under increasingly stressful circumstances to enable organizations and individuals respond to change quickly, most effectively and with long-lasting impact.

As many businesses already moved towards more interconnected operational model, future leaders would have to know how to manage global teams outside the physical boundaries of an office where face to face interaction would be minimized – so whole array of challanges around establishing authority and inspiring performance across global teams will become very relevant in addition to already mentioned qualities. The organizational challenges like recruiting, motivating, rewarding and retaining talent will most probably remain for leaders to build and sustain competitive environment.

I may be little biased now but I believe that a new breed of leaders will be born in environments similar to warfare where workers are shaped by perform-or-die concept and are not binded by petty moralities of corporate culture and unions. To raise from the mud of management mediocrity, the future leader would need to get his/her hands dirty, follow a vision and deliver quality results which are visible and impactful.

I wonder what the movie 300 would look like if the Spartans had been managed instead of lead?

Would we still think of the Battle of Thermopolae as an example of a great (albeit tragic) military victory of an under resourced army against a numerically superior opponent, or would King Leonidas have seen out his years on the lecture circuit talking about resource management?

Leadership is one of my favorite topics and I couldn’t imagine writing a better post about it.

I have always advocated that leaders must know how to listen well, foster open communication without bias, seek mutual understanding on difficult issues, and truly believe it is the people involved that create success in any endeavor.

Best Regards…

Jim