Marketing Online

All managers should be leaders, but most are administrators. If you are spending most of your time on budgets, organization charts, costs, compliance, and detail, you are an administrator. To become a leader, you need to spend more time with people, scanning opportunities, developing a vision, and setting goals.

 

 

 

Your chief executive officer (CEO) should be the firm’s architect;
and your chief operating officer (COO) should be the firm’s engineer
who optimizes within the firm’s architecture. To do their
respective jobs well, both should have selling skills. They need to sell
their ideas to their investors, peers, and staff. Leaders need to be
teachers and teach others to be leaders.
Bad managers, in contrast, rely on command and control to get
their ideas carried out.

 

A business leader’s job is “to make meaning” (John Seely Brown,
chief scientist of Xerox Corporation). The leader needs vision. Vision is
“the art of seeing things invisible” (Jonathan Swift). Vision is the
ability to conjure up a picture of great opportunities to inspire the employees
and the company’s stakeholders. The vision must burn in the
leader’s breast if it is to ignite a passion in others. At the same time, be
warned that there is a big difference between vision and hallucination.
The leader must be able to gain respect for his vision and as a
person. The followers must believe that the leader is serving them,
that he or she is a servant-leader. Napoleon said that “A leader is a
dealer in hope.” Robert Townsend, former CEO of Avis Rent-ACar,
observed: “True leadership must be for the benefit of the
followers, not the enrichment of the leaders.” Leadership works
best when there are committed followers.
Some think that great leaders need charisma, and point to people
such as Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill. They are forgetting
Harry Truman. The leader does not need charisma to be
effective. Charismatic leaders are often suspect. Some of the greatest
business leaders went about their work in a quiet way touching the
minds and hearts of their staff. They are friendly, approachable, and
caring. They act as role models. Charles R. Walgreen III transformed
Walgreen Co. into a company whose cumulative stock returns since
1975 have beaten the general stock market by over 15 times. Yet he
never takes credit, pointing instead to his great team, and he pins his
success on being “lucky.” Katherine Graham of The Washington Post
was another quiet leader who built a great newspaper into a greater
one. The Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu said: “A leader is best when
people barely know that he exists.”40
The best leaders want to surround themselves with talented
managers. They revel in finding managers who are smarter than they
are. CEO Tom Siebel wants the executives in his organization to be
significantly smarter than he is in their particular areas. The chief financial
officer (CFO) should be better at managing finances than