Dr Winter examines the tensions between leadership and management, the structures that hold organisations together, and the ideas that shape organisational life. His work sits where governance, culture, and strategy converge.
In passing off the thinking of others as our own, we fail to invoke the discipline essential in critical thinking. The most effective antidote to this is a crisp document, 'written with such clarity that it's like angels singing from on high', followed by a messy meeting in which people can robustly
Organisations that are above average in their track record of developing leader-managers put an emphasis on creating challenging opportunities, not just for aspiring talent but for incumbent Line Managers who can too easily become stale.
By leveraging the management tool of control to harness the energy released by the leadership tool of motivation, the informal leadership networks that arise can handle the greater demands that result from the organisational change process.
When alignment and planning are conjoined, the process releases untapped potential. This is because a leader-manager is energising people by unlocking feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. An approach that ultimately leads to greater wellness.
When Line Managers lack the hard skills of process design and implementation, the capacity to initiate changes in procedure, or the ability to write sound policy, and instead try to *lead* their team to success by hiring or co-opting other managers in the business to solve their problems, an engine
Structural and qualitative criteria can be applied in analysing employee interactions to answer: Are the people in my team effective informal leaders or merely highly social people building their brand?
Informal leadership is most effective when conducted with a small number of closed ties (involving three people) and a mix of friendship- and task-orientated activities. When the ties are open (involving only two people) or become too numerous, informal leadership begins to break down and can hinder
You can have high performing teams with deep hierarchies, so long as there is an open model to knowledge access. But when knowledge hiding goes on, hierarchies tend to erode team performance.
By stepping away from being a subject matter expert and toward a focus on people and coaching, a manager is in a much better position to transform their job into a leadership role.
