Managing Leadership^®

The core duty of a manager is to make decisions. Yes, the definitions revolve around the activities that characterize what type of decision-maker a manager is: planning, allocating, coordinating, and the like. But inescapably underlying the ability to do these, is the ability to make decisions.

These are often hard, risky decisions. They may involve restructuring, personnel realignment, market entry or abandonment - or even matters related to organizational identity, such as leadership philosophy or corporate culture matters.

Meetings are often a good venue for making sure a wide range of relevant data and information is assembled, evaluated, and used to inform good decisions. Specific meeting types are used for parts of the decision-making process, and they can be very effective. Indeed, when properly used, you can practically feel the organizational energy forming up around the process, preparing to unleash itself on execution of the ultimate decision.

But sometimes you can get an entirely different feeling at these meetings, can’t you? As though something unspoken is going on. Actually, this happens quite often, for two distinct reasons.

Perhaps the most common one has to do with accountability. We’ve all had bosses who took credit when things went well, and blamed us when things went wrong.

Many weak bosses have learned to run decision meetings with great sensitivity and art to this end. They can cause them to generate decisions that seem as though they’re suspended in mid-air, with no clear connection to their bases of support - until their results become clear. Then, magically, their authors appear grandly, or shamefully, out of the mist thrown aside by the suddenly pseudo-decisive boss.

Of course, if the results are positive, it is because the wise and far-seeing boss surfaced the issues from unclear antecedents, used his or her superior left-brain analytic skills to distill from them the proper solution, and then released the power of his or her right-brain leadership and communication skills to build support, culminating inevitably in the now celebrated result.

But if things go wrong - well, this is where the real artistry comes in: this is pretty much all right-brain stuff. Weak bosses reach deep into their wells of creativity to weave a story from the themes of individual and cliquish incompetence and depravity, and their own high-minded inclusive, consensus-driven approach to leadership that is sufficiently plausible to do three essential things:

• Save their own necks.

• Redirect responsibility in the degree necessary to the individuals or groups desired.

• In the process, increase his or her own power.

And meetings make it all so much more easy and effective. That’s why we all love meetings so much, isn’t it?

But that power thing - how did that get in there? We’ll consider that on Monday. See you then - and don’t be late!

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Be sure not to miss any of the posts in this series!

1. Collaboration jams
2. The swaying sword of Damocles
3. Smoke-filled rooms
4. Meetings - what are they all about?
5. How about we get together sometime?
6. Can we fit this in somewhere?
7. Making your meeting
8. Managing your meeting
9. Are you sure we were at the same meeting?

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Today’s tip: One of the few academic voices honestly worth giving a more-or-less automatic hearing to is that of Professor Henry Mintzberg. A refreshingly frank critic of the quality both of research and education produced by the academic community, his own thinking is generally cogently on point. See this BusinessWeek piece for a sample on an area of specialty for him. I will soon be doing a review of his book, Managers not MBAs, as well.

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