As 2008 comes to a close, the Monday Missive wishes you and yours the happiest of holidays. When the Missive began, two years ago this month, our goal was to learn and to share that with others. We hope that you find some measure of insight and inspiration from these messages. And we thank you for inspiring us in return.
Happy Holidays from our family to yours.
Once again, the Monday Missive presents our Holiday gift to you - the most rockin' digital holiday cards from around the Net. Enjoy. (Please send us any that you are think are totally amazing. We're collectors. But don't send us anything lame. Or we will FedEx you a lump of coal.)
http://fl-2.com/giftofcode/index.aspx (Via the Denver Egotist - who you should read cause they totally rock.) Site takes a while to load but your patience will be rewarded. Crank the sound - it's groovy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgBUqJzgvBo One word: Awesome.
http://andrewhoffmandesign.com/egotistholiday/ Note the subtle colour boxes. Yes, go on .... from left to right ...
http://liquidgivesagoat.com/ Despite the recession, Liquid is still hiring. Unfortunately, these candidates just didn't work out.
12/18/08
Leadership and Management Are Not Synonyms
First, we hope you don’t mind the multiple Missives this week. We just find these Brand Autopsy posts about Peter Drucker to be massively important. Today, Drucker describes the difference between leadership and management. So often, we confuse the two. With predictable results. Second, the Monday Missive hopes to acquire this book. It may even be necessary for us to send a holiday gift to ourselves. If so, we will share the lessons with you, dear readers, in the new year.
“Leadership is not magnetic personality … it is not ‘making friends and influencing people’—that is salesmanship.” — Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker clearly delineated the difference between being a leader and being a manager. He famously riffed, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” The right things for a leader to do, according to Drucker, include these ideals:
1. Courage with Character
It takes courage to practice “purposeful abandonment." It also takes character to make connections with people who are genuine and compassionate. Natural leaders do both.
2. Articulate a Clear Mission
“The foundation of effective leadership is thinking through the organization’s mission, defining it, and establishing it clearly and visibly. The leader sets the goals, sets the priorities, and sets and maintains the standards.” (THE ESSENTIAL DRUCKER, 2001)
3. Foster Loyalty
A leader must be worthy of receiving loyalty. To be so worthy, Drucker maintains leaders must set their standards high and always live by those high standards. When loyalty is fostered throughout a business, employee morale increases as does employee effectiveness.
4. Make Strengths Stronger
“Nothing destroys the spirit of an organization faster than focusing on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths, building on disabilities rather than on abilities. The focus must be on strength.” (THE PRACTICE OF MANAGEMENT, 1954)
5. Hire People Smarter than You
Ineffective leaders worry about their direct reports usurping them. Effective leaders don’t. Effective leaders encourage their direct reports to assume greater responsibility and to make more meaningful contributions to the business. Effective leaders measure their success by the success achieved of the people s/he hires, manages, and promotes.
6. Earn Trust
”To trust a leader is not to necessarily like him. Nor is it necessary to agree with him. Trust is the conviction a leader means what he says. It is a belief in something very old-fashioned, called ‘integrity.’” (THE ESSENTIAL DRUCKER, 2001)
7. Develop People
Peter Drucker understood no business will survive if it is led by only one leader. A thriving organization needs leaders throughout and not just at the helm. According to Drucker, “The gravest indictment of a leader is for the organization to collapse as soon as he leaves or dies.”
MM: If you are truly indispensable, you have failed as a leader.
“Leadership is not magnetic personality … it is not ‘making friends and influencing people’—that is salesmanship.” — Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker clearly delineated the difference between being a leader and being a manager. He famously riffed, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” The right things for a leader to do, according to Drucker, include these ideals:
1. Courage with Character
It takes courage to practice “purposeful abandonment." It also takes character to make connections with people who are genuine and compassionate. Natural leaders do both.
2. Articulate a Clear Mission
“The foundation of effective leadership is thinking through the organization’s mission, defining it, and establishing it clearly and visibly. The leader sets the goals, sets the priorities, and sets and maintains the standards.” (THE ESSENTIAL DRUCKER, 2001)
3. Foster Loyalty
A leader must be worthy of receiving loyalty. To be so worthy, Drucker maintains leaders must set their standards high and always live by those high standards. When loyalty is fostered throughout a business, employee morale increases as does employee effectiveness.
4. Make Strengths Stronger
“Nothing destroys the spirit of an organization faster than focusing on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths, building on disabilities rather than on abilities. The focus must be on strength.” (THE PRACTICE OF MANAGEMENT, 1954)
5. Hire People Smarter than You
Ineffective leaders worry about their direct reports usurping them. Effective leaders don’t. Effective leaders encourage their direct reports to assume greater responsibility and to make more meaningful contributions to the business. Effective leaders measure their success by the success achieved of the people s/he hires, manages, and promotes.
6. Earn Trust
”To trust a leader is not to necessarily like him. Nor is it necessary to agree with him. Trust is the conviction a leader means what he says. It is a belief in something very old-fashioned, called ‘integrity.’” (THE ESSENTIAL DRUCKER, 2001)
7. Develop People
Peter Drucker understood no business will survive if it is led by only one leader. A thriving organization needs leaders throughout and not just at the helm. According to Drucker, “The gravest indictment of a leader is for the organization to collapse as soon as he leaves or dies.”
MM: If you are truly indispensable, you have failed as a leader.
Focusing on Strength
Please enjoy this Bonus Mid-Week Missive. So timely with goal-setting happening for 2009. Summaries, snippets, and takeaways from Inside Drucker's Brain (Jeffrey Krames biography of the father of management - Peter Drucker) via Brand Autopsy.
“Most organizations take their employees’ strengths for granted and focus on minimizing their weaknesses. They [identify] ‘skill gaps’ or ‘areas of opportunity,’ and then pack them off to training classes so that weaknesses can be fixed. But this isn’t development, it is damage control. And by itself damage control is a poor strategy for elevating either the employee or the organization to world-class performance.” — Marcus Buckingham & Donald Clifton (2001)
Psst … decades before Marcus Buckingham became the poster child for “building upon strengths, not weakness,” Peter Drucker heralded the cause. In THE PRACTICE OF MANAGEMENT (1954), Drucker actually launched the strengths movement by writing:
“Nothing destroys the spirit of an organization faster than focusing on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths ... The focus must be on strength.”
“One can only build on strength. One can achieve only by doing. Appraisal must therefore aim first and foremost on bringing out what a man can do … a man should never be appointed to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths.”
“One cannot do anything with what one cannot do. Once cannot achieve anything with what one does not do … Appraisal must therefore aim first and foremost on bringing out what a man can do.”
Drucker revisited the concept of strengths-based development with a must-read Harvard Business Review article (MANAGING ONESELF, 1999). He updates his stance by writing:
“Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong. More often, people know what they are not good at - and even then more people are wrong than right. And yet, a person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at all.”
“Waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and far more work to improve from incompetence to low mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.”
Also in MANAGING ONESELF, Drucker explains how “measuring feedback analysis” is the best way to discover your strengths. He encourages executives to, at the time they make a key decision, write down the expectations they hope come from that decision. Then after nine or twelve months, compare the actual results with the written-down expectations. It’s a process that worked for Drucker to identify areas he excelled and areas where he struggled to meet expectations.
A more scientific way to identify one’s strengths is to use the StrengthsFinder test from Gallup. This online test formed the basis for Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001) and for Tom Rath’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 (2007).
“Most organizations take their employees’ strengths for granted and focus on minimizing their weaknesses. They [identify] ‘skill gaps’ or ‘areas of opportunity,’ and then pack them off to training classes so that weaknesses can be fixed. But this isn’t development, it is damage control. And by itself damage control is a poor strategy for elevating either the employee or the organization to world-class performance.” — Marcus Buckingham & Donald Clifton (2001)
Psst … decades before Marcus Buckingham became the poster child for “building upon strengths, not weakness,” Peter Drucker heralded the cause. In THE PRACTICE OF MANAGEMENT (1954), Drucker actually launched the strengths movement by writing:
“Nothing destroys the spirit of an organization faster than focusing on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths ... The focus must be on strength.”
“One can only build on strength. One can achieve only by doing. Appraisal must therefore aim first and foremost on bringing out what a man can do … a man should never be appointed to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths.”
“One cannot do anything with what one cannot do. Once cannot achieve anything with what one does not do … Appraisal must therefore aim first and foremost on bringing out what a man can do.”
Drucker revisited the concept of strengths-based development with a must-read Harvard Business Review article (MANAGING ONESELF, 1999). He updates his stance by writing:
“Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong. More often, people know what they are not good at - and even then more people are wrong than right. And yet, a person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at all.”
“Waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and far more work to improve from incompetence to low mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.”
Also in MANAGING ONESELF, Drucker explains how “measuring feedback analysis” is the best way to discover your strengths. He encourages executives to, at the time they make a key decision, write down the expectations they hope come from that decision. Then after nine or twelve months, compare the actual results with the written-down expectations. It’s a process that worked for Drucker to identify areas he excelled and areas where he struggled to meet expectations.
A more scientific way to identify one’s strengths is to use the StrengthsFinder test from Gallup. This online test formed the basis for Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001) and for Tom Rath’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 (2007).
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