We have an abundance of nevertheless vivid images of the so-called leader. These range from the master communicator in our midst to the visionary ascetic descending toward us from the mountain peak.
Somewhere in the middle of all that is the great captain. All the organizational strings of control terminate in this commanding personage’s hands. He or she knows all; in the midst of what to us is pure incomprehensible confusion stands this imperturbable officer, gazing at status charts and screens on the wall, reviewing reports handed to him (this image is normally male, square-jawed, gimlet-eyed, stentorian voiced), and barking orders which underlings rush with relief and enthusiasm to carry out.
In a comment to Monday’s post, Steve Roesler, who is the author of the must-read All Things Workplace, used the metaphor of a marksman to describe this sort of boss, speaking of some who may be too quick on the trigger. The comparison is apt, because if you make too many decisions, and fire them off too rapidly, they may take flight like a missile from a gun barrel - poorly aimed or not, but in either event, once fired, out of your control.
Yet an important way to maintain control is to exercise it less. Know the terrain, the issues, the players and their parts. Choose your problems well, aware that you will be investing your personal legitimacy and your organization’s resources in your struggle with them.
Finally, maintaining peripheral awareness, relax, aim, and squeeze the decision trigger. You will find that this process, at least in decision-making, will help you make better decisions to begin with, and to maintain more effective control of them as they propagate throughout the organization and beyond.
The gunslinger. It evokes images of the Old American West. A wild, desolate land knowing no law or order that couldn’t be threatened by a lone gunman riding malevolently into town, or preserved by another, the sheriff, striving heroically to protect it.
But we don’t live there. We live in the modern world of organizations populated and operated by the townspeople themselves. Peter Drucker argued that it is the task of modern management to develop means by which we ordinary people can run our organizations without a dangerous reliance on the uncertain supply of exceptional talent to protect or guide us.
Gunslingers don’t build that ability - rather, they cultivate a lethargic organizational dependence on their own putative individual genius. Moreover, not only are they unreliable, but half the time you don’t know if they’re the good guy or the bad guy. But the truth is, as long as they’re gunslingers, in today’s modern organizational world, they’re the bad guys.
So don’t try to dazzle us with your fancy shootin’ - just take your place alongside and pitch in together with the rest of us.
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Today’s tip: Speaking of modern organizations, one feature of them is the telecommuter. But there are signs that these may be fading into the setting sun, also. Please see this interesting report on the topic by Sue Shellenbarger, in the WSJ’s Work and Family column.
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Technorati Tags: leader, communicator, visionary, control, Steve Roesler, boss, legitimacy, organization, resource, decision, decision-making, management, talent, telecommuter, Sue Shellenbarger, WSJ, Work and Family, Peter Drucker
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