Profession "Leader". Or "Leader"? Let's figure it out!
I do not like the format “Ntsat Reasons”, but posts about 13 reasons not to be a leader and about 5 reasons in favor of being a real motivator for this post. In it I will talk about what the profession of "leader" consists of, a little touch on management tools. Well, I’ll debunk a couple of myths, such as “only one who is very well versed in the subject area can manage”.
Any organizational structure is quietly superimposed on these levels of management - I specifically showed the extreme organizational models for PMBook and the antithesis of "work for uncle." The leader of each level should have his own set of knowledge and skills.
Shifting responsibility is not delegation. Return responsibility or require authority to implement it. To determine what authority I have, I use my own method called “But I will take it and do it!”. It is very simple: the real responsibility is determined by those actions that the employee can carry out without approval "from above". For example, in order to understand whether I manage the project budget, I ask the question: “Can I spend some amount of the project budget without coordination at my discretion: give out a bonus to an employee who, in my opinion, excelled, buy more convenient means of labor, to organize training for team interaction, if I think there are problems? ” If the answer is “no” to this question, then I am not responsible for the budget. And you can be debased.
Management levels
To begin with, we will divide managers into levels according to what tasks they should solve.Any organizational structure is quietly superimposed on these levels of management - I specifically showed the extreme organizational models for PMBook and the antithesis of "work for uncle." The leader of each level should have his own set of knowledge and skills.
The head is an administratively allocated position
The leader has formal authority. In any team there are “informal leaders” or “best among equals” - they are not leaders, despite the fact that they have a significant impact on the final resultDespite the difference in the goals of each level, the subject of control is a person
Even time management is not “time management”, but “management of the priorities of a particular person - including himself - to maximize the number of tasks performed in a given period of time." That’s why comparing a manager with a “car driver” is incorrect - replacing a person in a company is never equal to replacing a wheel (yes, yes, I know that, in theory, a clearly defined business process reduces risks when changing an employee and increases the speed of his entry into the active phase but life has not yet come close to ideal). The best analogy for the tasks of the leader are the tasks of parents who raise children. Notice, educate, not train.If there is no leader, the result will still be obtained
The better the control system is built, the longer the "inertia movement" is maintained. Or vice versa - people organize themselves to achieve a specific goal without any formal management system. The top two management levels out of three are needed in order to ensure stability in the future (long and medium term), and the operational management level allows to reduce the cost and development risks. In order to do the same familiar work, a leader is not needed. Unfortunately, the lower the level of management, the more painful this fact is perceived by the leaders, up to complete nihilism. And then the pseudo-leader begins to close significant contacts, technologies, knowledge, so that he becomes irreplaceable. Otherwise, what else should he do?The task of any leader is to create the conditions for the effective work of their own subordinates
In each case, a specific indicator should be selected for effectiveness: for one company at a given time it is important to keep a team, but not to be on time, and for another company at the same historical moment it is important to make a project on time and do not care what further. If the leader does the work for his subordinate, then this should be a force majeure situation that should not be repeated in the future. Even at the operational level of management, where most often the leaders are people who grow up “from below” (the head of the business analysis department must be a former business analyst who decides to change his profession), if the manager undertakes to solve “the most difficult tasks, because he knows everything best of all ”, then this is a one-way road. The most difficult tasks must be solved by the same informal leader,Management tools should be chosen not only depending on the level, but also on the specific situation in the company
A serious misconception is the opinion that the toolkit of the leader does not become obsolete and is universal. This is about as “correct” as the statement that “in order to write most applications, you need to develop a data storage scheme (such as a database), write business rules and create a user interface”. It is difficult to find fault with the formal side, but in reality it is complete nonsense. So it is in the leadership profession. You cannot control a company of soldiers using agile techniques. You cannot master only one tool and then use it only (a classic example is a person who knows how to use only a hammer, sees nails in everything). For example, in the previous company it was necessary to unite good specialists into a team, to make you feel the significance of your own result. In this situation, the launch of a corporate newspaper, the publication of interviews with interesting specialists, the organization of the “analyst circle” and the “circle of architects” allowed us to achieve our goals. In the current company, on the contrary, there are a lot of leaders in the team and it is necessary to carefully divide the spheres of influence so that there is no rivalry and competition (we do not have a large number of specialists of the same type, so that internal competition can “carry” the best “up”).Delegated, delegated, but not delegated
Delegation is the transfer of authority to accomplish a task with responsibility for the result immediately to those who delegated responsibility. In this definition, all the principles laid down in it are important:- Delegation is the transfer of responsibility precisely for the result, and not for the implementation of the “process of achieving the result" (responsibilities for performing certain processes are determined by the job description and cannot be changed by delegation)
- Delegated authority must be at the level of the delegated task.
- Responsibility for the implementation of the task is not removed from the person who delegated it - the situation is when Petya tells his boss: “I delegated this task to Vasya, but he didn’t complete it, so Vasya is to blame, not me” when delegating is impossible.
Shifting responsibility is not delegation. Return responsibility or require authority to implement it. To determine what authority I have, I use my own method called “But I will take it and do it!”. It is very simple: the real responsibility is determined by those actions that the employee can carry out without approval "from above". For example, in order to understand whether I manage the project budget, I ask the question: “Can I spend some amount of the project budget without coordination at my discretion: give out a bonus to an employee who, in my opinion, excelled, buy more convenient means of labor, to organize training for team interaction, if I think there are problems? ” If the answer is “no” to this question, then I am not responsible for the budget. And you can be debased.