When organisations invest in developing a culture that not just enables but requires that Line Managers be true leader-managers, they institutionalise the organisational behaviour necessary for the ultimate act of leading at scale.
In many ways, my management career began a little over 30-years ago. It was the mid-1990s, I was in shorts, people were still seen as 'human resources', and organisational culture was central. However, culture did not try and pander to GenMe, so it was not about what the organisation could do for you but what you could do for the organisation. There was no Google, no Chat GPT to supplement a dearth of education, people read books rather than memes and social posts; even those who were not big readers at least engaged with the comparatively long form Reader's Digest. And my mother was HR Director for MBF (now known as BUPA).
Valerie Winter was, if I say so myself, a phenomenally talented people manager and, at a time when organisations were long on planning, she apprehended and fostered strategic leadership and the importance of philosophy in the shaping of organisational culture. As a woman in what was still very much a 'man's world' she blazed many trails to the top jobs in her field by never being a 'victim of institutional sexism', instead doing a better job than the men.
Coming into the city after what I thought was a hard day at school, I would listen to conversations, hear my mother discourse about reports, and watch the way in which team cohesion was created.
Much of what my mother did would be seen as 'given' today, but in the 1980s and 1990s it was ground-breaking and required deep knowledge of the practise of management and leadership to plan, organise, align, and win the hearts and minds of the Board and Executive Leadership Team.
This philosophy of leader-management stuck with me and through my career I have had the privilege of working with people who exemplify its practice and art. I have also had the learning experiences from working with the dull monotony of those who neither lead nor manage, but instead seek to sell their vision to apathetic teams via PowerPoint.
This series on leader-managers was conceived to provide some insights into the process of not just hiring but creating great Line Managers. Beginning with Leading Change and Managing Complexity I made the case for why it is essential that leadership and management are viewed as two distinct and equally essential skill sets in the organisation of resources.
Management is about organising resources and the inherent complexity that arises as resources increase: establishing and maintaining processes, procedures, and policies—creating high performing teams—and preventing organisations from descending into chaos.
In Strategic Direction Versus Initiative Planning I took a look at the difference between the two essential skills needed by leader-managers—planning and strategy.
Strategy tends to be inductive in nature and revolves around looking for relationships and patterns. These relationships and patterns help the strategist to draw conclusions from which they can make choices about events that may take place.
In the penultimate article in this initial series looking at leader-managers I addressed Managing Control and Leading Motivation and outlined the reasons why motivation alone will do little to achieve results.
In this final article, I seek to outline how organisations can foster leader-managers. That is, people who combine the competencies unique to the separate disciplines of leading and managing into a more effective and holistic approach to Line Management.
