On the Edge

An observer of organizations could conclude that most are on the edge of a precipice teetering between failure and success. What keeps an organization from falling over the cliff is the attention paid to the most important things—managing, leading, and human systems. Within the body of literature for these subjects, the following are addressed:

• Management: Establishing the proper mechanisms to prepare the organization for ongoing change, evolution, revolution and improvement. The functions included in the dictum: Planning, Organizing, Controlling and Leading.¹

• Leadership: A component of the overall management function that is purposed to execute change.¹

• Human Behavioral. A behavioral perspective that directs focus to the outcome of leadership actions and all human activities on job satisfaction, organizational citizenship behavior, productivity, absences, turnover and workplace deviance.² While this category could be considered a part of the management and leadership function, it warrants its own category; this may be the most ignored of the three.

 What may cause a business to waver is the lack of attention to an adequate degree toward all three domains.

Management

This is the foundation of any business. Without an adequate “floor” for the rest of the organization to stand on, a business can fail. For example, while most will give lip service to the importance of hiring the right people, observations over and over show acceptance of “good enough” over the pursuit of excellence. Regardless of the organization, this is vital to its success and follows the Good to Great³ mantra of making sure the right people are on the bus; even after someone is hired, the wrong people must still be kicked off.

Staffing is linked to planning. Organizational members must plan, know why they exist and where they are going, or as the saying goes, it will go nowhere fast. The chaotic fury of the day-to-day activities will be without purpose if there is no plan. But a plan is not sufficient; if the organization plans but the competency does not exist to execute, then it is a wasted activity.

Most organizations have decent, nice people who would prefer to do good work; in some unfortunate instances, the organization itself becomes its own obstacle. When people are good and everyone is trying hard, it would seem that it has the formula for success. Unfortunately, trying is not the same thing as having the competency and capability to focus energies to achieve goals or effect change. When effort becomes the end over that of achievement, the business may be overtaken (i.e. sold) because of languishing outcomes. Experience suggests it can also result from inattention to the management issues described and “lack of stomach” to make the gut-wrenching decisions to improve. Without vigilant attention, failure can loom.

Leadership

Leadership is a component of the management function and is responsible for change. That is, management is about decreasing the disorder of an organization (or controlling it to the degree possible) in order to establish the arena for change to occur. Leadership essentially builds on the pillars of management to take it from its current place to the next.

In an ideal world, the management functions are sound and the leader simply needs to move forward with the desired changes. Unfortunately, once organizations have a sound foundation, they all too often shift focus and forget to provide it ongoing consideration. In other words, leaders find they have to re-establish the management underpinning because it was allowed to atrophy; unfortunately, this takes valuable time and energy away from the movement forward.

Leadership is the most difficult of activities, and finding good leaders is easier said than done. There are many good managers out there but far fewer good leaders (I have witnessed only a few in my career). Since leading is about change, it necessarily is about the human equation and motivating the workers to align with organizational interests. Leading effectiveness can be learned (to a certain degree), but participants often confuse managing with leading. Management focuses on process and controls (see earlier definition) and leading focuses on people.

If a business must decide between having a good manager or having a good leader, the business should choose the manager; this is because he or she would see to it that the requisite foundation exists. At least if the foundation is there, the business can go forward even if by accident. However, organizations are not required to choose between the two; organizations should equally focus on both, but most don’t.  Of course leading is difficult and challenging, and its effectiveness is not always measurable; however, measurability does not make it any less worthy of attention.

Human Behavioral

The human behavioral factor often gets ignored. Some leaders adhere to the philosophy “they will follow me or else” when trying to execute change. The hierarchical structure of a business can allow a leader to coerce effort. Unfortunately, this type of leader/manager is not addressing the kind of followership being sought. The “follow me or else” attitude generates compliance and people doing just enough to get by; organizations, however, need people to go beyond the minimum requirements of the job (i.e. organizational citizenship behavior).

The human behavioral component is the responsibility of all supervisors, and everyone needs to be trained; many are not knowledgeable about how to think this way and find it challenging to simultaneously focus on the tasks while dealing with the human factors. In addition, organizations often fail to even measure some or all of these variables; it is difficult to fix a problem that no one knows exists.

Organizations teeter between success and failure, and failure evolves from not paying attention to key organizational factors that enhance the chances for success. This publication identifies three factors, and there are others. Inattention and/or letting down its guard also can lead to failure.

Please feel free to make comments.

References

¹ Griffin, R.W. (2011). Management (10th ed.). Mason, OH: Southwestern Cengage Learning.

² Robbins, S., & Judge, T. (2011). Organizational Behavior (14th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

³ Collins, J. (2001). Good to Great. New York, NY: HarperCollins.