The 5 Overarching Management Principles

Hammers alone do not put up good shelves

Managers and leaders, take a look at your job description. 

Now take a look at the job description from your previous role…and the one before that. How vastly different are they?

In fact, take a look at the ‘Roles and Responsibilities’, or ‘Job Description’ documents for any senior manager or business leader and they all look broadly similar. They describe in great detail the goals, objectives, and deliverables of the particular position but, at 30,000ft, aren’t they all essentially saying the same basic few things? In fact, when you distill it right down, all leadership positions can be expressed in as few as 5 principles regardless of marketplace, products, or services. Similarly, when you boil down the miles and miles of management and leadership books available, they too can be summarized into these same very simple and powerful 5 bedrock principles.

Before we examine the 5 basic principles, let’s take it as a given that all leadership roles require, as a minimum, a certain number of regular behaviors, namely: goal-setting and expectation-setting, resource allocation, and conflict resolution – these are amongst the primary activities, of course. So too is coaching, recruiting, supervising, mentoring, training, data-tracking, course-correction, and so on; but these do not describe what the actual, overarching role-deliverables are for the manager or leader.

When researching my latest, we worked with a wide range of leaders and managers to understand the few critical fundamental elements of their role. We discovered that all leaders and managers shared these 5 broad imperatives:
 

To improve results…
…by building a team of individuals who are…
…self-sufficient…
…with a high degree of skill…
…and a high level of motivation.

That’s it. Simple. Not easy, but simple.

Each word in this description is, in and of itself, worthy of investigation and can be broken down into smaller and more precise sub-sets of activity, competence, and attribute, of course: but the general thrust and concept holds true for any senior/leadership role that has direct reports below them on the org-chart.

At a high level, improving results is a given. So too is the principle that teams achieve more than disparate groups of people. Self-sufficiency negates the need for micro-management, and no leader wants that. High skill delivers high-quality work. High motivation ensures that the team works hard – displaying not only a high Work ethic, but also high levels of commitment. Work ethic and commitment are not the same thing, of course: give me commitment over work ethic any day: but that’s the topic of another article, I feel.

Whilst the above describes leadership in a nutshell, here’s where our research surprised us. Both leaders and the individuals in their business have all wanted exactly the same thing all along – they were just looking at the issue from different ends of the telescope, that’s all.

When we asked their team members what they wanted from their job, guess what, they told us the exact same thing. Take a look.

The teams told us that they wanted the following:
 

To see the company succeed…
…by working in a winning team…
…given a degree of autonomy…
…having mastery to do what’s required…
…and feel a sense of real purpose.

Compare and contrast these two lists for a second:
 

 
They share the same issues from both sides of the fence. Both sides of the same coin – completely aligned and integrated.

If both sides of the business want the same thing, it can’t be beyond the wit of man to make it happen, right? So, where do so many leaders and managers get it wrong, and why do so many resorts to leaving the company to look for pastures new? 

It turns out that (poor) managers believe that they can ‘manage’ all of the above: but they simply can’t. They can manage people’s behaviors, that’s the easy part. But they can’t manage peoples’ attitudes, core values and beliefs – only coaching addresses these things. Neither can they manage skill-gaps, only training delivers improvements there. Most (bad) managers try to ‘manage’ everything, and the management tool only fixes a tiny problem, behaviors. If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail – but some jobs require screwdrivers, planes, and drills. Hammers alone do not put up good shelves.

Imagine the Head Coach of your favorite football team telling the owner of the team that, rather than attend all of the coaching sessions, he’d rather hear from the other coaches once a month how the players were doing. What’s more, rather than being on the sidelines during the games, he’s rather read about how the individuals performed in the game by reading the sports pages the next day. And, rather than explaining the pre-game playbook, delivering the half-time pep-talk, or the full-time review, he much rather just send the team a short memo.  And, rather than reviewing the particular skills and attributes of each player himself, he’d rather give the job to a recruiter or scout. And, rather than play to win, he’d much rather play not to lose. How long do you think that particular Head Coach would last?

Coaches need to be in the thick of it all, otherwise, they simply can’t do their jobs. Only by observing what happens in training, and in the game (in real-time), can coaches design a personalized training regime, a winning playbook, and applicable strategy. Guess what? Leaders are exactly the same. 

Regular, structured ride alongs are the lifeblood of every business leader and manager, and they are the single best way to observe, at first hand, what needs to be done to improve results, to build a team, to create self-sufficiency, and to improve skill and motivation. Ride alongs are the mechanism where the leader discovers who needs coaching, and where; who needs training, and why; and what things need managing.

Since leaders and managers all want the same outcomes, spend lots of time with them whilst they perform their individual roles in order to figure out the best ways to make the magic happen.