Great bosses don't manage, they lead
No one wants to be managed, so stop doing it. Management is boring. Put the word ``manage" into the thesaurus ``ThinkMap," and you get back such dreariness as ``supervise," ``grapple," ``make do," ``cope," ``oversee" and ``get by." Which of those will make you want to get out of bed? Which will make your employees look forward to seeing you?
The best managers work at not managing. Great bosses understand that leadership success is:
A: 90 percent hiring and de-hiring
B: 10 percent inspiring
C: 0 percent managing. (If an employee can't be inspired and needs managing, see A.)
That passage is from a revolutionary new book, ``(Great) Employees Only: How Gifted Bosses Hire and De-Hire Their Way to Success" (John Wiley & Sons), a book authored by -- what a coincidence! -- Dale Dauten.
The book summarizes what I've learned from spending more than a decade studying great bosses, observing them as they work and noting what they do differently from typical bosses. One of the striking divergences is that the great ones spend almost no time supervising employees. That's why I came to believe that the formula for leadership success is 90-10-0. Notice that's a formula for leadership success, not leadership time. It's not that gifted bosses devote no energy to managing employees, but true leaders understand that most traditional management activities are ``police" functions, preventing negatives. Thus, the issue isn't how not to manage, but how to not manage. Progress comes from getting the right team to turn up, turned-on.
This sounds like a run-up to the old ``hire good people and get out of their way." But wise leaders understand that the natural state of organizations is devolution -- human nature slides us into bureaucracy and inertia. The great ones set big goals and inspire new experiments.
Sam Walton, for instance, was known for relentlessly asking, ``What are you working on?" and ``What have you tried?" What he wanted to hear in response was about experiments and innovations. So both questions really came down to the same question: ``What's new?"
Where does this fit into the philosophy of ``servant leadership"? This appealing notion is often misapplied, making it antileadership -- the servant is reduced to making sure the budgets are available and that the toilets flush. Gifted bosses don't allow themselves to be sucked down into the bureaucracy. After all, picture Sam Walton, Walt Disney, Oprah, or Steve Jobs. These are not ``Let me help you" people, these are ``Let's figure out how we can do something extraordinarily helpful/cool/profitable together" people.
By asking hard questions, gifted bosses soon find out which employees want to rise to being extraordinary and which of those have the talent to help carry the team.
The result is summed up in this, my favorite passage from ``(Great) Employees Only":
``Ultimately, the skillful use of talent courtship along with de-hiring allows the gifted boss to create a team that everyone wants to be a part of, establishing a culture that does much of the hiring and de-hiring. What does that culture look like? When allies are working toward a worthy goal, it is often difficult for an outsider to guess who is the leader. Such a team doesn't seem to have a boss, and yet it needs one. The boss is not there to require compliance, but to inspire experimentation. The gifted boss doesn't get out of the way, but sees what could be, thus taking up the role as Keeper of The Way."
Dale Dauten is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at dale@dauten.com. 