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Chapter 4 – Leadership and
Management
I just watched and
enjoyed the Management instalment of this series. It is a well structured video and makes a lot of sense. As a business improvement consultant to many different companies, I discovered that the successful ones that were really going somewhere all had something in common.
They had two managers, or people who shared the top two positions in the company. One was always outward facing, charismatic and visionary. That
one was the dreamer who proposed amazing things, and inspired the staff who admired and followed.
The other one was organised. This
one had a systematic and rational approach to business, a natural planner, and willing to make the hard decisions. I was one of the very few that admired or was inspired by the people in this role. This person often had to throw a bucket of cold water over the other manager's dreams and visions, pulling them apart into feasible and impractical. They would have terrible fights and often found it hard to find common ground, but these pairs would always seem to realise that they depended heavily on the other.
So
I agree with Alan that a successful business needs both. But I also understand that both sets of characteristics don't work well in the same room together, and it is very rare indeed to see them both work well in the one head together. But I have seen it a couple of times. These
people who manage both personalities, don't run them both at the same time. They can sit around a cup of coffee talking visions, and whip their listeners into a frenzy of enthusiasm. Then they can lock themselves hermit like in their office, and plan it all out, review progress, tweak processes, and write out training plans for a new operation. My experience of these unique individuals is that they have strong and unpredictable mood swings as well.
So my advice would be that
if you are one of these two personality types, and can afford to hire your own counterpart, that is the best way to go. If you are not, Alan gives some good advice on developing the missing skills, but even so, I would consider it temporary until you can hire that skill set. In this situation you are lucky if you're the inspired dreamer, they are much harder to find, and almost impossible to harness into a project that is not theirs. You are much better off if you find that you are the natural leader with vision, and can hire the manager. But when doing so, don't look for someone with traits like you, or even someone you like.
Find someone with a history of achieving managerial success.If you're the natural manager and do need to hire the brilliant and charismatic visionary, take great care.
Don't fall for the glamour and confidence to the point where you hand over control. Always take a moment after being swept away by their grand plans, to check through what is possible, what is necessary now, and how practical these directions might really be. Never forget that dreams are crucial, but it still takes hard work to turn them into reality.
I always enjoy reading your comments Tim.
I enjoyed a quote I've read before: "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." I think it encapsulates a lot of what you have just described.
I really enjoy the odd bit of pop-psychology. And what you've written above aligns quite closely with both that quote, and my views on management and leadership. My personality type (ENTP -- "The Visionary") throws me right into one of those categories that you described, which I hear is very common among entrepreneurs -- we really enjoy overturning old truisms, and finding new opportunities. This often means I have lots of thoughts and solutions coming through my head all the time, and often I feel it is lack of special knowledge that prevents me from being able to categorise them as "feasible" or "why did you think that?". Every third time is a charm.
This became more apparent from my time in the USA, when Brandon and I went to get in on some of that "PhD in business" action Alan has been distributing over the years. As a general thing, I had not encountered many well-versed blockchain engineers or business experts, but in the USA I had people who knew more about both than me in Joe and Alan. This meant they both got to listen to an earful of ever-insta-mined ideas, where I'd listen to the feedback, and then try to reformulate the idea to be workable through every objection, or until the reformed idea was no longer practical. Often these objections are not initially accounted for as a result of not having special knowledge of the particular area I'm creating ideas for. I may have read a lot of literature and technical whitepapers, but I'm not a competent coder that can claim they've already "done it". Bouncing ideas back and forth is a crucial part of any peer-review process, and it is only made possible by having people around you with different expertise or thinking than you.
I learned a lot more practical and crucial lessons about business in 3 months by observing and listening to Alan than I did in in my Information Systems major -- where I chose to follow the business analysis and management specialisation, rather than the more programming-heavy IT solutions option (I wouldn't have been a great coder anyway). There is something to be said about practical versus theoretical knowledge. Having received the teaching of both, I am confident that the lessons taken from observing things in action are wildly different to those taught in schools.
Another observation I had was the benefits of a small team - which invariably means you need to form a team with a broad skillset shared between few members, and sometimes outsourcing where absolutely necessary. The larger the team size, the more lines of communication need to exist between its members, and the more bureaucratic it can become. It is my view that informally structured teams may communicate better than more hierarchically structured ones, and team size makes the former much more difficult. If x is the number of members in a team, each new addition to the team creates x-1 new lines of communication (adding a 10th member adds 9 new potential lines of direct communication). I have observed this having worked in in large organisations, where owners and directors go through multiple lines of lower management tiers to communicate a simple message or feedback, when they could just walk 30 seconds. Then there are smaller and more agile teams like ours where there are much fewer lines of communication required, and it is much easier to keep people in the loop, and on the same page. Inevitably with growth, organisations may need to consider more hierarchical structures.