Can switching your mind set from manager to leader transform your life?
Forbes carried out a survey where they estimate that a lack of leadership in businesses costs up to $550bn annually. They discovered that companies have over 80 percent of managers that do not know how to lead people. This leads to distrust, isolated working, demotivated employees, high turnover of staff and a lack of results, which ultimately leads to a lower profit.
Becoming a leader is not just for the business environment as it also has a huge impact in your life. This is because people who decide to take the lead of their life see more happiness, stronger relationships, greater success and higher income. This is why leadership is so important. It can be applied to the working environment as well as your personal life, and you can see great success in both. So the time to listen is now. The time to make a change is now. The time to take the lead is now.
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The world does not need another person just managing, it needs you to take the lead. Peter Drucker, a renowned management consultant, identified in the 1990s that the world was in a shift to a knowledge society. Similar to what I’m discussing, Drucker identified that we are heavily reliant on tangible results whereas we should now be relying on intangible results in many cases. For example, understanding information and decision making are more critical not than many skills.
Take previous generations of workers for example, the employees within the manufacturing period responded well to strong management techniques or close monitoring of activities, such as micromanagement. It worked because the era was based on tangible products, for example on a manufacturing line, one worker equals three product components per hour. This was highly measurable and if production slipped it was easy to discipline that person so they improve, or completely replace that person with another person. To be clear, I am in no way trying to mock of devalue the work of people from previous generations, but simply identify how people were viewed in the eyes of management methods. People were, unfortunately, just another cog in a machine which led to the feeling of “them and us”. This is because tangible people produced tangible results.
Things are different now, for example in the civil engineering industry a person is often hired for their ability to deal with a high pressured situation, for having high attention to detail, a strong team approach, for being creative or for their ability to lead. How do you measure these attributes? How do you measure one’s ability to deal with a high pressured situation? How do you measure someone’s ability to lead? Can you again set objective metrics, such as “you should lead one person in the right direction per day or per hour”? The answer is no because we are an era of information where people bring intangible skills to the company, which are a lot harder to measure and track, but what we can measure and what we can track is results. This is why the current generations who make up the majority of our workforce do not like to be managed and I am one of those people. I am someone who prefers to be led not managed.
Many companies focus on the tangible management and tracking aspect because they feel like this gives them control, but what this does is it creates a distance between them and the employees. This behaviour creates distrust and demotivation. This is why people of today need to be:
- Shown the way not told the way
- They need to be guided and coached, not restricted and reprimanded
- They need to be treated with respect and freedom, not belittled and micromanaged
This rings true for all aspects of life, whether you’re dealing with employees and colleagues at work, whether you’re a leader of a company and you’re dealing with clients, whether you are home and you’re dealing with your children or relationships. This rings true for all aspects of your life. You need to stop managing your life and start leading your life. You have to take the lead.
Now you need to ask yourself some very important questions:
- Do you fall into the category of a manager or a leader?
- Why do you feel this way?
- How do you feel being in that category?
- Do you know what it means to be a true leader or are you a manager?
Cast your mind back to when you had a conversation with a colleague or a friend and you asked them, “how are you today?” and their response was, “yeah I’m managing”. Do you feel like they’re truly happy? Do you feel like they are in total control of what they’re doing? Do you feel like they are leading their life or just getting by? That is the difference between a manager and a leader.
There is, unfortunately, a huge gulf in the world today in respects to which people categorise themselves in this area. This is because leadership is not taught and very few truly understand what it means to be a leader. Very few people received the coaching or guidance to become a leader. This is not something that is available to everyone in the world today this is why people such as Steve Jobs, Nelson Mandela and Oprah Winfrey are considered to be such incredible people and great leaders, but what we need to understand is that they are just people just like you and me. They grew up in the same world as you and me playing by the same rules, but they decided to behave differently and we’re in control of their actions. They decided to behave like a leader. They did not learn how to be a leader in school as it is not taught in majority of schools so they had to learn along the way. They understood their values over time and then decided to change their behaviours in order to become a better leader. They probably didn’t even realize that they were such great leaders until later on in their lives because of how many people they influenced. This is why leadership is so important in the business world and in your life today.
So many people are just getting by, then they get to a later stage in their life and they have regrets because they did not take the lead. It is also very important to understand what a great leader looks like. You do not need to be the next Oprah, Churchill or Gandhi, you just need to be a great leader at what you do. Whether this is a leader of your own life, leading a project team of 30 or 40 people, or leading a business with 5000 employees. Leadership behaviours are the same.
I want to make these leadership behaviours accessible to all. I have developed a model, called the A.R.E model. This model breaks down leadership into three core areas, simplifying leadership, so that the everyday person can take these abilities and behavioural skills and apply them to their everyday life to behave more like a leader and less like a manager. To take greater control and lead their own lives.
I’ve spent the last ten years collating this information, storing it and then sharing it in a way to you that is easily understandable and that can be applied to your life in simple steps. I’ve done this by turning these behaviours into a digestible book – just click the image below.
Thank you for reading, JT
