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Michael Useem believes there’s a
clear difference between leadership and management.
“When you take a job as a CIO, you have distinct responsibilities
outlined by the CEO,” said the author of Leading
Up: How to Lead Your Boss So You Both Win (Crown;
$25.95). A professor of management at Wharton College and
director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management,
Useem defines a CIO’s job as “managing those responsibilities,
which is usually a strategy for competitive gain.”
Yet the author acknowledges that to make that
happen, IT leaders have to summon leadership skills—which
he describes as “the persuasive techniques needed to
reach goals by harnessing the talents of others.” In
a nutshell, management and leadership skills go hand in hand—to
be a good leader, you have to be a crackerjack manager.
Useem gathered quotes about leadership from several distinguished
names. For management writer Peter Drucker, leadership is
having followers who “do the right thing.” For
political historian James MacGregor Burns, leadership is a
“calling.” For President Abraham Lincoln, leadership
is appealing to the “better angels of our nature. Leadership
is also a matter of making a difference.”
Clearly, according to Useem, the term leadership
has quite a few meanings. “Leadership entails building
a winning strategy and revamping an organization to pursue
it. Leading requires us to make an active choice among many
plausible alternatives, and it depends on bringing others
along, on mobilizing them to get the job done. Leadership
is at its best when the vision is strategic, the voice persuasive,
and the results tangible.”
Great leadership encourages people to be innovative,
which means giving them a longer leash—yet not too long,
as people need to be held accountable. “They need greater
freedom in achieving their responsibility,” he explains,
adding, “Leadership is what you bring above and beyond
what is in the office to the office. It’s a value-add
question.”
The questions for today’s tech leaders
include:
• What is the value you are personally adding to the
company?
• What will I leave when I leave my job—what will
I have contributed?
• What am I adding to the job that was not there before?
“There are different ways to take up that
hard-to-define reality that separates effective management,
which is necessary to achieve effective leadership. That is
every CIO’s quest,” said Useem.
Academic research confirms that leaders have the greatest
impact on organizations when the environments are least predictable.
With the globalization of markets, rapid changes in technologies,
and a growing number of competitors, firms are growing to
appreciate good leadership throughout the ranks and view it
as vital for staying on top of uncertain and fast-changing
environments.
Beyond explaining the subtle interrelationship
between leading and managing, Useem chucks the tired platitudes
about upward and downward management and insists that leadership
should be viewed as a four-pronged compass—downward,
outward, upward, and inward—a compass that moves in
all four directions.
The skill of delegating work downward is being
supplemented by the talent for working outward with partners,
Useem explains. Lateral leadership—in which tech leaders
leverage partners' strengths instead of directing subordinates'
actions—is required for achieving results when managers
have no authority to guarantee them.
Outward and upward leadership is about taking
charge when managers are not formally in charge. It assures
that advice arrives from and information flows to all points
on the corporate compass, not just from the top down, Useem
says. But for these distinct forms of leadership to work well,
they also require inward self-assurance and personal self-confidence.
Because the downward capacity has always defined
what leadership is all about, the other three features are
less well appreciated, Useem notes. “The complete manager
requires an aptitude for working all cardinal points of the
leadership compass, and we had thus better go on with the
task of mastering the outward, upward, and inward components
as well.”
That brings us back to defining what is leadership and what
is managing. “Doing what you are asked to do is the
essence of management,” Useem explains. “Going
beyond what you are asked to do on behalf of the company,
shareholders, and employees puts another spin on the job.
There is a big difference in doing what you are told to do
when you take over the CIO job and what you bring to the job.
It means bringing your own special touch and your own special
capacity and skill set. You do not get to be CEO unless you
are ready to work with unsolved problems.”
Leadership is defined by getting the management
job done. “Yet they also must be able to think beyond
their office,” he says. “A CIO must ask, ‘How
is the company going to make money from this technology?’
These types of CIOs demonstrate the potential to move up.
They are constantly aware of the benefits of thinking beyond
their function. They are doing their job, but they are also
thinking like the CEO or CFO. They also devote time to getting
their employees excited and enlisting them in their mission.
This attitude is infectious and is immediately noticeable
to the CEO.”
Useem’s all-encompassing view of the leadership/management
world is a good foundation for building a successful career.
Here are four useful tips he provided:
• Think strategically: “You have to see way ahead
and beyond corners. It means looking one to three years out.”
• Become persuasive: If you’re timid and lack
confidence, you must learn to enhance your communication skills
to bring your ideas across.
• Act decisively and make things happen.
• Retain credibility by functioning with character and
integrity.The biggest obstacle to achieving leadership and
management success is the danger in taking a myopic view of
the world, Useem says. If you do, you will be doomed to wallow
in the purgatory of mediocrity because you will never see
beyond your job.
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