Management as an occupation is a distraction to real leadership. Think of the one person you have had in your career that you admired most as a leader.

What did she or he do that allowed her/him to earn your respect and admiration?
Are these traits and actions hallmarks of high quality leadership or management?

Above all, managers who are the most effective in their positions also tend to be the best leaders. And the backbone of their positional authority is a broadly inclusive approach to leading rather than the alternative which can be viewed as exclusive, and at times, prejudicial, descriminatory practice.

More specifically, managers who are great enablers of Communities of Passion (CoP) tend to encourage feedback, listen carefully to all opinions, and embrace employees at every level of the operation, encouraging them to think for themselves, and more importantly, generate solutions to problems closest to where they occur.

Problem

Traditional management hierarchies and structures tend to aggregate power, authority and responsibility toward the top of the operation, which in turn may debilitate solution generation at lower levels of the corporation. Effectively, this traditional, industrial mind-set disempoweres rank-and-file members, and at best, places some or all of the responsibility where none of the authority rests.

Solution

Encouraging bottom up rather than top down leadership structures and patterns, management by inclusion involves building permeable structures that allow for input from all levels of an operation and distributed power structures that push out decisions and solution generation to all levels of the operation, and more importantly closest to where the challenges exist.

What this strategy requires is proper alignment of both responsibility and authority for decision making, and enabling communities where collaboration and cross-functional, cross-hierarchy spanning behavior is encouraged rather than restricted.

Because of positional authority laced with titles in most operations, the burden for cultivating such inclusive environments rests at the very top. One cannot expect employees to carry the water for transcending the usual boundaries. It starts with the top reaching down all the way to the bottom of the operation and hoisting every one up with them.

Practical Impact

Enabling your people is probably one of the most undervalued leadership traits, but the most important toward firing up communities of passion. Moreover, the ability to do so is way more art than science. Exceptional managers must have an uncanny ability to enable an inclusive vs. exclusive approach vis-a-vis leading their operations. The good news is that this can be learned, but more importantly must be practiced. The effect of distributing power - that is distribution of responsibility and corresponding authority can have a profound effect on empowering people to engage in solution finding across the board and at every level.

First Steps

Step 1- Recognize you have a problem
Step 2 - Build out your ability to engage and listen to others
Step 3 - Spend less time in your office and more time with your people on the shop floor
Step 4 - ditch email as the main means of correspondence and communication in favor of in person or over the telephone discourse
Step 5 - cast aside your thinking that because you are at the head of the operation that you must have all the answers, in fact you don't.
Step 6 - Work with integrity - it's not enough to talk the talk. You must walk the walk, or risk being called out as a hypocrite

Credits

I would like to especially thank the Hackathon pilot team as this Hack was born out of the process and conversation around enabling communities of passion.

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November 3, 2016 at 10:32pm

Maryann Farrugia

I say high quality management because eventually if a business has a good management, high quality leadership will follow. Management will eventually be the pillar if the business so they must be good.

Maryann Farrugia Google+
http://www.offshorebusinessprocessing.com/management-team

January 4, 2017 at 10:19pm

Shane Brewer

We can get a good level of inspiration on leadership from different sources. Most probably mentors are playing a vital role in our leadership development process. No doubt, we all need high quality of leadership attitude to improve our professional as well as personal skills. So, we need to take positive tips from experts and following their footsteps. From here, we can get a complete description on leadership and management and their importance in our professional life. Thanks for this wonderful article.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLJW6YmFv9Q