Leadership Transition: Management vs. Leadership

• Becoming a leader is more like jumping a chasm than walking smoothly on a bridge.
• Traditional management education, training, and mentoring are not likely to be helpful in making this transition.
• Leadership involves fundamentally different processes compared to managing.
• Leaders cannot be developed by more liberal doses of traditional management inputs.

Dimensions for the Transition

• From a manager of ‘facts' and 'data' to a manager of emotions: Leadership involves managing the emotions that exist among people in the organization.
• From a manager of emotions to a generator of emotions: Generating the right kind of emotions is essential.
• People must be inspired by the goals and must seek fulfillment in attaining them.
• Emotions such as loyalty and passion for a cause are to be generated.
• From a follower of standards to a setter of standards: Leaders set their own standards often at variance with prevailing and accepted views.
• Sets leaders apart from run-of-the-mill managers.
• From a realist to a dreamer: Leaders are great dreamers that inspire people, governed less by the practicality of the dreams than by the fact that they are worth pursuing.
• From an optimizer to a compromiser: Leaders do not try to optimize.
• Driven by the need to compromise, make the best of a situation, and pry open loose bricks to gain entry into their world of dreams.
• Keen on making sure that their compromises do not dilute the basic objectives and become a sell-out.

The Transition Involves Three Steps

• Knowing oneself: One's strong as well as weak points, potential, and capabilities.
• Becoming oneself: Shedding the masks and rediscovering one's true self.
• Deciding what to become in future and moving towards it: Self-development of gathering of new perspectives, fresh interpretation of facts, reflection, and developing a fresh worldview.
• Self-development is a vital ingredient of leadership.

Traditional Means of Control

• Managers have exercised their power and authority through three sources: positional power, superior experience, and greater access to information.
• All of these sources are becoming less and less reliable.
• Traditionally, the dominant source of control for the top managers has been positional power, declining due to increased education levels and democratization.

Leadership Development

• Broadly defined as taking charge, setting goals and priorities, establishing a direction, and getting people to do what they need to do willingly and enthusiastically.
• A leader is not just the CEO; leaders exist at all levels.
• Realizing the importance of leadership, organizations are in quest of ways and means of getting the leaders in place.
• Most commonly adopted techniques are academic training programs, experiential training programs, and mentorship programs.
• These programs often have limited impact because they are externally directed, while leadership is a process of internal development.
• These programs give inputs on how, in general, one could become a leader but fail to address the question of how a particular person can become a leader.
• Leadership development is an intensely personal process.

Transition 1: From a Manager of 'Facts' and 'Data' to a Manager of 'Emotions'

• Management education concentrates on decisions based on facts and data, teaching how to analyze and interpret these more efficiently.
• Managerial jobs involve both collection and interpretation of data.
• Typical problem-solving approache involves a 'cold' and an 'unemotional' analysis of alternatives.
• Emotions should not come in the way of decisions.
• Managers may fall into the trap of believing that the key to good results is cold, unemotional analysis.
• At the most, the worker who asked questions is considered a nuisance, to be got rid of quickly; at worst, he is someone who cannot grasp how his leaving is going to benefit hundreds of others.
• A rational framework cannot answer the worker's questions, answered through a combination of logic, understanding, and empathy.
• Managers who are strong in analytical abilities are weak in managing emotions.

Transition 2: From an ‘Emotions Manager' to an 'Emotions Generator'

• For becoming a leader, managing the existing emotions is not enough; generating the right emotions is also essential.
• These emotions cannot be generated through a logical process; in fact, they are quite often contrary to logic.
• Leaders generate emotions of fear and insecurity in organizations when they become complacent or want to achieve a new goal.

Transition 3: From a Follower of Standards to a Setter of Standards

• Leaders have the ability to see a new vision, a new opportunity, an ideal to be followed, and this involves what may be called a creative destruction of the status quo.
• This position has serious implications for a manager aspiring to be a leader.
• Typically, a manager has been trained to play by the rules and not to ‘rock the boat.'

Transition 4: From a Realist to a Dreamer

• Dreams need a certain time for inactivity, a time for 'doing nothing,' merely contemplating.

Transition 5: From an Optimizer to a Compromiser

• Management education starts with an assumption that the job of a manager is to maximize some parameters essentially economic parameters.

Making the Transition

• What is required is the acquisition of a totally new perspective of the role the person has to play as a leader.
• The answer is in self-development.
• The manager, in attempting this transition, must, first of all, be willing to examine himself truly and frankly, understanding his weaknesses and prejudices, his bright and blind spots, his abilities and disabilities.
• People are not what they are.
• They wear masks, they behave in ways expected of them, do things they do not want to do.
• Leadership is also finding one's own way.
• Transition is really not walking over a bridge smoothly but jumping a chasm, or like in the Sidhartha story, crossing a river.