team building & leadership expert michael cardus

Mangerial Leadership Practices to make you successful

Leadership – is the accountability in some, but not in all roles, to influence one or more others – followers – willingly to accept the leader’s purpose and goals and all to move in the direction set by the leader by suffusing authority with leadership practices appropriate for that role. (Jaques 1998)

A manager can get work done simply by using authority to instruct people to do it! Such exercise of managerial authority, without a context of managerial leadership practices, produces indifference in people and indifferent work.

All managers must be accountable for carrying out requisite leadership practices in relation to their direct reports, as an integral accompaniment of their authority.

  • It is fruitless to ask “Is management or leadership more important in an organization?”, in the same sense that it is a non-question to ask whether the length and color of a stick are more important than the stick.
  • You cannot have the thing without its properties.

Requisite Managerial Leadership Practices:

  1. Two-way managerial team work: Regular meetings with all direct reports to discuss context, plans, problems, suggestions.
  2. Context Setting: Regular up-dating of the background within which the work must be carried out.
  3. Planning: Presentations of alternative courses of action to deal with problems, to ensure direct reports’ understanding and to get their inputs.
  4. Task Assignments: Assigning tasks to ensure just-in-time and just-within-quality standards working.
  5. Personal Effectiveness Appraisal: Judging how well direct reports are working, and discussing it with them.
  6. Merit Review: Periodic judgment and discussion of personal effectiveness, and annual evaluation of applied capability with decision on pay level within level of work.
  7. Coaching: Helping individuals learn to handle a wider range of the processes that occur within the business unit, so that they may advance in career.
  8. Selection and Orientation: Practices for choosing new team-members and for introducing them to the business unit.
  9. Deselection and Dismissal.
  10. Continual Improvement.

Referenced

  • Elliott Jaques Requisite Organization; 1998; page pair 99