There are a ton of styles, but effectively managing people and leadership skills are not about style. Style is an excuse to not do what is needed. No, managing/leading effectively is about doing what the people being managed need in order to do a better job. in order to unleash their full potential of creativity, innovation, productivity, motivation and commitment on their work.

Marcus Buckingham in the employ of Gallup has done us a great service in this by surveying over 3 million workforce members and 80,000 managers. They learned the most from the workforce since a manager must understand how they react to managerial actions in order to manage them effectively. Buckingham also determined ways to measure whether or not managers were effective by surveying the workforce. This Gallup’s Q12 survey.

Although I agree somewhat with Buckingham and applaud him for his work, I believe that managerial effectiveness can best be determined by measuring what the manager does against a set of proven performance standards. By proven, I mean the ones I used and caused my subordinate managers to use in successfully turning around four different management disasters, causing each to be able to blow away competitors. The result was always the same and always far better than anyone dreamed possible.

Best regards, Ben

>>JM – Creating a team (or teams) is absolutely one of the goals of being a successful leader. It has a lot to do with the size of the group or organization that one leads.

Thanks for the comments!

Best regards, JM

Edward Brown
Core Edge Image & Charisma Institute

Leadership applies to people and entails the sending of value standard messages to people which most of them then follow/use. Thus we say that they have been “led” in the direction of those standards. Leadership is one side of the coin called values, the other side being followership.

Leadership in the workplace consists of the value standards reflected in everything an employee experiences because these standards are what employees follow by using them to perform their work. Most of what the employee experiences is the support or lack thereof provided by management – such as training, tools, parts, discipline, direction, material, procedures, rules, technical advice, documentation, information, planning, etc.

Leadership is not a process any manager can change. It happens inexorably every minute of every day because of the way people respond to management actions. The only choice available to a manager is the standard (good, bad, mediocre or in between) which he/she transmits to employees.

Because of these characteristics, “followership” turns out to be a major force in managing people. Those managers who take advantage of it can become extremely effective at “managing” their human capital.

For example, let’s look at the top-down command and control technique that is the most widely used method to manage people.

Top-down concentrates on producing goals, targets, visions, orders and other directives in order to control the workforce and thereby achieve organizational success. Focusing on giving direction prevents these managers from doing much of anything else. Thus top-down treats employees like robots in the “shut up and listen, I know better than you” mode, and rarely if ever listens to them. By so doing this approach ignores every employee’s basic need to be heard and to be respected. In addition, not listening to employees makes top management ignorant of what is really going on in the workplace thus making their directives misguided at best and irrelevant at worst.

There are many more things wrong about top-down and it results in a very low performance by the workforce, far lower than they are capable of producing. Its opposite can achieve an opposite result wherein people unleash their full potential of creativity, innovation, productivity, motivation, and commitment on their work. This after all should be the only primary goal of managing people.

I proved this to be true in my 30+ years of managing people, and that included effecting four successful turnarounds of management disasters. Of course, it took me 12 years to escape the top-down command and control approach.

To more about how to manage people, please read these Leadership Articles starting with the article “Leadership, Good or Bad”.

Best regards, Ben

>>Kevin, Thanks for your suggestion about “passion” and “values”, the alignment of those two IS a very powerful factor in one’s success as a leader. That discussion is likely worth a post of it’s own!

>>Corinne, yes, one can be born with charisma and use it for evil. As CK mentioned, we should focus on the positive and optimistic uses of leadership.

Thanks for the discussion!

It’s not all about “charisma” but the application of leadership. Remember that Ted Bundy had charisma – that doesn’t mean it was usered for good!
But what “charismatic leadership” comes to mind for me is more along the lines of JFK, Mother Teresa, and even MLK “I have a dream” speech, etc.