The Role of Management in Leading Up, Down, and Across
How does day-to-day management fit into this equation of leading down, up, and across? To get the job done, order and accountability are required.
As boss, you are answerable for the activity and output of people who report to you, and you are answerable to your boss for the same. If you are part of a cross-organizational work group, you hold collective responsibility for what is produced. Authority and responsibility are housed in management positions and reporting.
There is much debate in the leadership field on the distinctions and overlaps between management and leadership. In practice, your job is to master both. Leadership and management are interdependent in ways that are important though puzzling. Here is a simple distinction: management is more about the what of your endeavors, and leadership is more about the why.
Meta-leaders establish and clarify purpose for the enterprise (the why). They imbue activities with meaning. They set big picture direction and objectives. They communicate the value that derives from the initiative. They help individual workers understand how their efforts contribute to organizational mission and its significant impact. Eliciting commitment beyond compliance and order beyond control, meta-leaders find ways to spur innovation to best adapt the enterprise to changing circumstances. These are the human factors.
Leadership without management is a prescription for disappointment. The management side of your meta-leadership is ultimately responsible for achievement. It is management that sets goals, solves problems, and produces outcomes valuable for people, the organization, and those the organization serves. Without substantial advancement toward tangible objectives, you are merely a dreamer, full of aspirational ideas that gain no traction. It is one thing to create a vision; it is another to manage its realization. Leaders cannot ignore the order and benchmarks established by the management reckoning of the equation.
Management without leadership likewise generates activity that accomplishes little beyond the routine. Managers are ultimately responsible for productivity—for an organization’s smooth functioning, high output, and optimal quality. However, sustained peak performance is not possible when people are unmotivated and lack a sense of purpose in what they are doing. Subordinates who do not share a commitment to the larger mission and whose contributions are not valued do not invest themselves in their work. Managers cannot ignore these human factors and the engagement and commitment that derives from them.
How do you solve the leadership-management puzzle? Picture the skills and capabilities associated with them lying on a continuum, with management at one end and leadership at the other. Getting stuck at one pole or the other limits your reach and effectiveness. Instead, strive to move fluidly between the two poles, according to the problem or opportunity you face, the people involved, and the purposes and objectives that motivate you and others. In some circumstances, management skills will be dominant; at other times, leadership capabilities will be more critical.
We frame the challenges of both leading and managing as three zones: vision and mission, strategy and execution, and impact and assessment. Your vision and mission (your why) must be clear and compelling to your followers, your boss, and your allies. Your strategy and execution (your what) should be effective and efficient. Finally, your impact and assessment (your measures of success) should be tangible, relevant, and tracking continuous improvement over time.
Think of accomplishment as the outcome of productivity divided by activity. Your goal is to reach or exceed the intended level of productivity by ably expending reasonable energy, effort, and resources. For example, you create ten units of productivity with ten units of activity. Pretty good. What if you expend one hundred units of activity for that same productivity? Not so good.
An unclear mission, poorly conceived strategy, or lack of appropriate metrics leads to high activity with low productivity. Likewise if your mission is championing a social cause or responding to a crisis: what effort does it take to achieve critical objectives? Excessive meetings, cumbersome reporting, and petty internal skirmishes escalate activity and contribute little to productivity. Your goal is to increase the productivity resulting from each unit of activity.
Avoid becoming stuck in one zone. Instead, seek value and connection across all three zones. Shift your attention between zones as needed, calibrating and recalibrating your decisions and actions to leverage resources and activity as you work to improve outcomes. A meaningful and important vision should result in significant and measurable impact. Driving the learning curve in all three zones boosts performance, improves feedback, and increases accountability. You both stimulate change and show progress that reflects achievement.
In times of crisis or significant change, uncertainty increases, individual and organizational status may be in question, and autonomy may be restricted. Sensing a loss of control, people go to the basement. This is a time when your leadership practices rise to the fore.
Research by David Rock and others shows that this social pain is processed by the brain in similar ways to physical pain. It’s important to attend to it. Clarify why your activities are important and meaningful to your followers. Create a rallying narrative, and restore certainty through transparent processes. Confidence in a process brings stability even when people disagree with its outcome. Reassure people of their status: We can do this. You are important to the team. Empower people to do their jobs. Demonstrated competence is a sure route out of the basement and back to productivity. Your goal is achieving both unity of effort and tangible results.
By contrast, in times of certainty—when the organization and its people are in a steady state—you manage internal systems to optimize performance. You “keep the trains running on time.” These are moments when you are confident about the predictability in your external environment—the market, the political landscape, or customer preferences—as well as the stability of your internal procedures. The same actions and conditions repeat from day to day with little variance. In a dynamic world, such conditions are rare; when they do occur, recognize them for what they are. Get yourself out of the way and let people get their job done.
For meta-leaders, there is no either-or choice between management and leadership: you live at the intersection, and its balance is always shifting.
The figure illustrates how the balance between leadership and management changes in different contexts. As a meta-leader, you dissect and blend leadership and management in myriad possible permutations.
Routine situations typically require greater emphasis on management, so you draw more on those skills and resources. In crisis and change situations, with ambiguity, dynamism, and risk increasing, you shift on the continuum, applying the necessary leadership capacities and skills.
For example, when safety, security, or strict quality standards are the top concern, the more regimented thinking, processes, and protocols of your management tool box serve you well. When devising strategy, discerning the implications of shifting demographics, or charting the reorganization of your company, however, such fine-grained control stifles the necessary questioning, innovation, and creativity in your brain’s executive circuits. These are times to draw predominantly on your leadership capabilities.
How do you both lead and manage at the same time? Choose to be an intentional designer of your relationships. At times you deploy the full measure of your authority. In other situations, you have or you use very little. Proactively set the expectations of those with whom you connect.
Meta-Leading Your Organizational Relationships
Many individuals believe that they “own” their position and its authority. They do not. In fact, occupying a spot in a hierarchy is far more like a time-share—a place you inhabit for a fixed period and then pass along to someone else. The position itself usually precedes you and is likely to still be there after you move on. Your job as meta-leader, in part, is to leave the place in better shape than you found it. Remembe
r, when you leave, your authority stays behind.
Treat your position as though it were on loan. It must be sustainable in your absence. Your subordinates, boss, customers, and others should be better off for your having been in it. Build and encourage leadership capacity throughout your organization. Overcome fears that your followers might upstage you; instead, learn to invest in them and their accomplishments. If your unit cannot function without you, you are not doing your job. Find and prepare people who can eventually assume your responsibilities. Remember, you can’t be promoted if there is no one to replace you.
In leading down, up, and across, authority resides in distinctive measures that can be taken in different interactions and relationships. “The boss gives the order while others obey” simply does not describe productive leadership situations.
Relying solely on your formal authority as boss and always deferring to the authority of your boss are both recipes for failure. As a boss, you have powers that come with the authority of your position. As a subordinate, you cede powers to your boss. There are certain decisions you cannot make. As a colleague leading across, you have authority that is often far more fluid. Understanding the dynamics of the authorities you possess and knowing how to leverage the authorities of others is essential to your success.
As you craft the transition between what is and what can be, your meta-leadership task—up, down, and across your organization—is to intentionally apply your authority in combination with your influence. Beyond your organization, your authority is limited, and so influence is your currency. We turn next to leading beyond authority.
Questions for Journaling
Marc Mathieu, Eric McNulty, and James Dunne work in different industries and face different contexts. Each proved himself adept at using his authority and working with the power and authority held by others. How can you achieve similar success? What tools should be ready in your workroom?
What are the problems you typically encounter? How will you know if you succeed?
How is authority allocated within your organization? How might it be better designed and practiced?
TEN
CONNECTIVITY
Leading Beyond to Recraft Relationships
It’s a beautiful sunny Tuesday morning. Jimmy Dunne, one of three managing partners at the Wall Street investment banking firm Sandler O’Neill + Partners, is making the most of the weather on a Westchester golf course. He is playing to qualify for the US Mid-Amateur Championship.
The three partners who run the firm maintain a pragmatic balance. Herman Sandler is a polished gentleman and a mentor, a guide to employees, and an icon of stability for customers. Chris “Quack” Quackenbush is the sharp negotiator, in charge of investment banking for the firm. Quack and Jimmy have been best friends for nearly thirty years, ever since they met on the golf range as teenage caddies.
Dunne, a tough Irishman, is loud, brash, and known for being the enforcer within the firm. When someone has to be fired, the other partners come to him. Dunne, who is his own man, finds the arrangement convenient. He says what he thinks. And the arrangement works because he balances and is balanced by his two partners.
That Tuesday morning is September 11, 2001. At 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 crashes into 2 World Trade Center, where the firm has its main offices on the 104th floor. Of the 171 employees, 83 partners and employees are already in the office; 66 will die, and 17 will survive. Among the dead are Herman Sandler and Chris Quackenbush.
Dunne first hears the news on the golf course. He experiences an unspeakable and overwhelming flood of loss. Quack was his closest friend. All the others, his friends and colleagues, are gone as well. The firm is now smoldering in the rubble.
As the shock of the losses sinks in, he has a decision to make: will Sandler O’Neill fall with the building, or will it come back to life?
For Dunne, the answer is obvious: Sandler O’Neill will endure. He ascends from the basement of his despair. He has to provide for the families who lost loved ones and support the employees who survived. When he eventually learns that Osama bin Laden was determined to destroy the American way of life by attacking Wall Street and the World Trade Center, Dunne gains a cause and an enemy to rally against. Bin Laden will not win this fight.
This is Dunne’s “you’re it” moment. To bring the firm back to life, he needs to be a different kind of boss, not the old Jimmy Dunne. Knowing he will have to adopt a new mind-set, he begins by saying, “I need to be more like Herman now. I need to be more like Chris now.” These words become his refrain. He wants Sandler O’Neill to embody the best of its three leaders, to carry on their legacy in his leadership. He can’t simply be the tough guy. His employees are too vulnerable for that. He has to be something else. Change, though difficult, is imperative. Dunne has to transform himself if he is going to transform the company.
“The more the pressure, the higher the heat, the better I’ll perform,” he later told us. “I get very calm under pressure. My colleagues say, ‘If Jimmy is calm, the problem is big.’ You are what you perceive yourself to be. Crises don’t build character; they reveal it.”
As he and the survivors at Sandler O’Neill pull themselves and the business together, Dunne differentiates what he calls his right-hand issues from his left-hand ones. The right hand is about the grieving families, the distraught and mourning employees, and their emotional trials and difficulties in moving forward. The left hand is about the business: finding new space, hiring new employees, taking care of clients.
Dunne is clear on one thing: the right hand will always take precedence. He and the firm do what is necessary to help people get through, providing salaries, bonuses, and health care for survivors of the employees who died. Dunne finds that taking care of the right-hand issues puts the left-hand issues into a context that makes them surmountable. The remaining staff rallies.
Dunne has to do more, however, than rally his people. He must regain the trust of his customers and other Wall Street firms. That is his live-or-die mission as leader of the company. An epic narrative of compassion, collaboration, and resilience unfolds. The firm wins the goodwill of other Wall Street firms, which lend them space and people so that they can get back on their feet. Companies, even competitors, send them business.
Jimmy Dunne emerged as one of the icons of post-9/11 resilience in part because he became a multidimensional meta-leader. He showed his emotions and he encouraged others to do the same. He attended dozens of funerals for his lost colleagues. He supported his employees and helped them as they took steps toward recovery and productivity. Being supportive was part of the healing, his own as well as the company’s. Even though Dunne hated wearing suits, they became his steady wardrobe; in fact, he dressed impeccably, just as Herman Sandler had. Without his two partners, he alone had to balance all three dimensions of meta-leadership: He became “the person.” He remained hopeful while embracing the harsh realities of “the situation.” And he brought people together, serving as a role model for building “connectivity.” He was “it,” and people followed him.
Just two months after the 9/11 attacks, Sandler O’Neill was again profitable.
On September 6, 2006, the following appeared in the New York Times: “No one will ever accuse Jimmy Dunne of being the perfect boss. ‘He’s not always the most patient listener, and he can be brutally blunt,’ said the firm’s former co-chief operating officer, Michael Lacovara. ‘And I think he believes he can do anybody’s job as well as they can do it themselves.’ Mr. Lacovara added, ‘If on September 12, 2001, he hadn’t felt that way, we wouldn’t be here today.’ Mr. Dunne turned out to be the exact right person to lead Sandler O’Neill out of the abyss.”
Jimmy Dunne transformed himself so that he could transform his company. This is what it means to become a meta-leader. It is an all-in effort designed to create an all-in outcome. It is leading every day so that you’re ready when it matters most.
Dunne’s story encompasses much of what is critic
al about connectivity across your personal and professional network. You draw upon this network daily, leading beyond to people over whom you have no direct authority or context for command.
Dunne honed his ability to recraft a range of relationships. He earned confidence and trust by demonstrating his commitment, reliability, and integrity. He built productive connections with those to whom he was accountable. And as evidenced by the actions of his employees, customers, suppliers, and even competitors, he was adept at fashioning strong bonds with both those over whom he had formal authority and those over whom he had no authority at all. He didn’t order that trust and respect; he earned it. When a negative situation arose, he was able to draw on the wealth of support that bolstered his own resilience and that of the company. Despite daunting challenges, that connectivity enabled him to keep himself, and his organization, focused on the core mission.
Leading Beyond in Practice
In leading beyond, you sketch the big picture to make sense of a wide range of factors, including people, objectives, organizations, resources, and ideals outside your own organization. It describes what everyone can do together—as an enterprise of entities—that cannot be accomplished separately. All involved believe in you, what you stand for, and what you aspire to—the value of the enterprise.
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