Should you lead or manage?

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As the Owner/CEO/President should you lead or manage?
The CEO or senior executive leadership needs to spent more time leading than managing for their organizations to remain competitive in today's business world. Apply the 80-20 time rule to the vision and direction of the organization versus day-to-day managing. It is more important for you to be a leader than a manager.
By Lars G. Harrison
In today's information age and fast changing business climate, the need for being able to quickly adapt to new business opportunities, more competition, shorter product cycles, better communication has made business volatile and businesses can no longer hold on their laurels. Change is a necessity. Businesses must become more entrepreneurial, flexible to ever-changing markets, competitions, and customers' needs and desires to keep up with and prosper in today's information age. A global economy requires leaders who are quick to determine the best course for their company. The question is, should the owner, CEO, or President of an organization remain managing the day-to-day operations on the expense of having less time to lead, establishing direction, inspire, align people and produce change in his organization? Or should he or she turn over much of the day-to-day operations and management to the COO, Director of Operations, or equivalent, and rather concentrate on leading the organization? What is the difference between being a manager and a leader in regard to developing and carrying out an action plan or agenda for an organization's growth and keeping its objectives?

Creating a plan of action
The Manager's responsibilities in creating an action plan or agenda to furthering the growth of the organization, rests more with planning an budgeting, such as establishing detailed steps and timetables for achieving results and then allocating various resources necessary to achieve the objectives.
A Leader on the other hand should be more concerned with establishing the direction of the organization by developing a vision of the future (e.g. six months-one year-two year-five year plans), strategies for producing the changes needed to achieve this vision. This requires an undertaking of capturing the knowledge existing in the organization, stirring up ideas from employees, suppliers, customers, and outside consultants, finding out new areas for business development and markets to penetrate. Core businesses should be looked at. Cost-restructuring, evaluating, cataloging and possible engineering the all business processes. Possible breaking up business in smaller and profitable business units. Evaluating all resources, including human resources, to determine their effectiveness, and getting rid of slack, unused, or under-utilized resources. This process might take six months to a year or even longer. Core values, mission statement, and other functional plans to attend to should be established. Often business owners and CEO will call upon consultants to tell them what to do. What process to reengineer, set up quality standards, etc. And then hoping that this is enough. In order for this to work, the leader must take on a leadership role, change the conscience of the organization to believe in and furthering the action plan. It is not sufficient to say that we set it in motion, now it should take care of it self. The Leader must be convinced of the vision and change and inculcate it and make it the organization's conscience.

Empowering People to achieve the plan of action
A Manager is responsible for organizing and staffing human people, usually by establishing some structure for accomplishing the plan's requirements, staffing the structure with competent and trained individuals, delegating responsibilities and authority for carrying out the plan, setting policies and procedures that guides the people through the process, and creating methods or systems to monitor implementation.
A Leader on the other hand must align people to the plan of action, by communicating the direction of the organization and the vision, with constant words and deeds to every part of the organization, and especially to the those whose cooperation is needed the most. Teams and coalitions should be created, with representatives from all departments that are included in the particular process, including customers and suppliers, that understand the vision and the strategies and the reasons, objectives for them and the underpinnings, and influence them to accept the vision and seek its validation.

Executing the plan of action
The way a Manager executes a plan of action often rests on controlling and solving problems, for instance, monitoring results and how they abide by or deviates from the plan of action, then planning and organizing to solve these problems.
The Leader must execute the plan of action by motivating and inspiring the people involved with or being part of the plan. This entails energizing people to overcome major political, bureaucratic and other resource oriented barriers to change, by satisfying people's basic and unfulfilled needs. Why should they be part of this vision and plan of action? How can they benefit from change? The Leader must see it from their perspective. Naturally, the Leader must also have a deep understanding of business, and turn the vison into reality by inspire people to see the vision as a reality for them. Obviously, this requires patience and hard work.
Many employees are employed in a specific job, where they are not only underutilized and underrewarded, but often also where they are not fulfilled. There are employees who would hate their jobs simply because they are not a good fit for the job. So, they take their talents home where there side business utilize their skills, or they resolve to suppress these skills. Many people take jobs because they have to work to live. Ask your people what they want to do for the organization, and most important, what is their vision for their lives. An organization must create a legacy, and many times it creates great products and services, but do they create a better society and better people. It is true what Dale Carnegie once said that, you can get everything in live you want, if you give others what they want.

The outcome of the plan of action
The Manager produces a degree of predictability and order that is necessary and vital for the organization, which has the potential of consistently producing desired short-term key results to customers and shareholders. Keeping the budget, creating value and net worth for stockholders, giving customers superior quality products and services on time that exceed their expectations, making all operations run smoothly, ensuring employees of work are all aspect of the operations manager's desired outcomes.
The Leader should, however, produce change that are not often pleasant but needed to survive and prosper. This often dramatic change has the potential of producing useful change; such as, new products or services that customers want, new approaches to labor relations that help the firm remain competitive, an active, invigorating, creative and stimulating work place, and even more value to the stockholders in the long-term. Change should be less to do with economies than with attitudes and corporate culture. Attitudes, ideas, vision and the implementation of these into reality by people make economies. Their is so much untapped resources in people that could be used by companies.
Senior management should be concerned with the management end of each action plan, but in our opinion the boss, CEO or President of the firm, should and must become a leader, in making change the priority. The Leader should be totally committed to lead, establish directions, align people, motivating and inspire the organization toward change and the vision, and produce change that will have lasting effect. Should he or she then forfeit the daily operations and management of the firm? No. But most of the activities should be spent, not on investor relations or operational management, but rather on setting the course, inspiring people to adopt and carry out the vision, and leading the organization toward new and better horizons. He or she would better serve the organization as a discoverer, inventor and establishes of new markets and opportunities than as a stagnant manager.
To succeed as a Leader you must know and understand where opportunities lie today and in the future, and capitalize on these opportunities should be your prime concern. Your associates, customers, suppliers, children, consumers, etc. all have ideas which exploited could open new doors. Shareholders are not necessarily the ones to turn to for ideas for today's and tomorrow's opportunities.
Although, we don't advocate that you should abdicate the day-to-day operations of the organization, but we read in the business pages every week that another CEO has been ousted by the board because he or she didn't grow the business and kept up with trends and new technologies, and developing new markets and opportunities. If you want to succeed in the 21st century, you better be grabbing those opportunities and working on disseminating your vision to the organization, before it's too late.

Lars G. Harrison can be reached at lars_harrison@yahoo.com.