Profession "Leader". Or "Leadership"? Let's see!

I do not like the “Nts reasons” format, but posts about 13 reasons not to be a leader and about 5 reasons in favor of being have become a real motivator of this post. In it, I will talk about what the profession of “leader” is, I’ll touch on management tools a bit. Well, I’ll debunk a couple of myths, like "only someone who knows the subject area very well can rule."

Management levels

To begin with, we divide managers into levels according to the tasks they need to solve.

Any organizational structure is quietly superimposed on these levels of management - I specifically showed the extreme organizational models for PMBook and the antipode of “work for uncle”. The leader of each level should have its own set of knowledge and skills.

The head is an administrative position.

The manager has formal authority. In any team there are “informal leaders” or “the best among equals” - they are not leaders, despite the fact that they have a significant impact on the final result
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Despite the difference in goals of each level, the subject of management is a person

Even time management is not “time management”, but “management of the priorities of a specific person — including himself — to maximize the number of tasks completed during a specified period of time.” That is why comparing a manager with a “driver of a car” is incorrect - replacing a person in a company never equals changing a wheel (yes, yes, I know that, in theory, a well-defined business process reduces risks when changing employees and increases the speed of his entry into the active phase , but life is still not close to the ideal). The best analogy for the tasks of the leader are the tasks of parents who bring up children. Notice, bring up, and not trained.

If there is no leader, the result will still be obtained.

The better the control system is built, the longer the “inertial motion” remains. Or vice versa - people organize themselves to achieve a certain goal without any formal management system. The top two levels of management of the three are needed in order to ensure stability in the future (long and medium term), and the operational level of management allows reducing costs and risks in development. In order to do the same familiar work a manager 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 himself with significant contacts, technologies, knowledge, so that he becomes indispensable. Otherwise, what else can he do?

The task of any manager is to create conditions for the effective work of their own subordinates.

In each case, a specific indicator should be chosen for effectiveness: for one company at a given moment of time it is important to keep the team, but not to have time for the deadlines, and for another company at the same historical moment it is important to make the project exactly on time and don't care farther. If the manager performs 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 management level, where more often than not, managers become people who grow “from below” (the head of the business analysis department should be a former business analyst who decided to change profession) if the manager takes on “the most difficult tasks because he knows everything best of all ", then it is one way. The most difficult tasks should be solved by the most informal leader who is not formally a leader.

Management tools should be selected 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 a manager is not outdated and is universal. This is about as “correct” as the statement that “in order to write most application programs, you need to develop a data storage scheme (such as a database), write business rules and make a user interface.” On the formal side, it is difficult to find fault, but in reality is complete nonsense. Similarly, in the leadership profession. You can not control a company of soldiers using agile-techniques. You can not master only one tool and then use it only (a classic example is a person who knows how to use only a hammer, he sees nails in everything). For example, in the previous company it was necessary to unite good specialists in a team, to make them feel the significance of their own results. In this situation, the launch of a corporate newspaper, the publication of interviews with interesting specialists, the organization of the “circle of analysts” and the “circle of architects” made it possible to achieve the goals set. In a current company, on the contrary, there are a lot of leaders in the team and it is necessary to carefully divide 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 out” the best “up”).

Delegated, delegated, but not expelled

Delegation is the transfer of authority to carry out a task with responsibility for the result directly to the one who delegated responsibility. In this definition, all the principles laid down in it are important:

• Delegation is the transfer of responsibility for the result, and not for the implementation of the “process of achieving the result” (the duties to perform certain processes are determined by the job description and cannot be changed by delegation)
• The delegated authority must correspond to the level of the delegated task.
• Responsibility for the implementation of the task is not removed from the one who delegated it - a situation where Petya says to his boss: “I delegated this task to Vasya, but he did not cope, which means Vasya is to blame, but not me” during delegation.

Shifting responsibility is not delegation. Return responsibility or require authority to implement it. To determine what powers 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 the actions that the employee can perform without the approval of the "top". For example, in order to understand whether I manage the project budget, I ask the question: “Can I spend some money from the project budget without my consent at my own discretion: issue an award to an employee who, in my opinion, has distinguished himself, buy more convenient means of labor, to organize training on team interaction, if I think that there are problems? ". If the answer to this question is "no", then I am not responsible for the budget. And you can odelegirovatsya.

“Let’s talk to you, forgive I don’t know my name” (c)

If the main tool of the programmer is the keyboard, the analyst is a pen and paper, then the main tool of the manager is the conference table. We manage people, remember? Moreover, the manager does not indicate what should be done by subordinates, but creates conditions for them to say: “Oh, I know what to do” and jumped out from the table with burning eyes. The situation when the boss does not know the name of his own subordinate says that the optimum number of control points has been exceeded. The “control point” is not equal to the “number of people in submission”. More than 7 people can be managed quite effectively if there is no more than 7 control points among them. Or centers of influence. For example, in the previous work in my department there were more than 20 people - analysts, architects, programmers and specialists of the 2nd line of support. I knew everyone by name. But if I needed to hold a working meeting, then it was enough for me to call one or two analysts, one or two architects, one or two programmers, and I knew for sure that the decisions made through them would reach everyone else. As a result, I substantiated the need for my own deputy not in order to divide the functional duties, but in order to move to a tactical level of management, leaving the operational one on it.

Its among strangers, a stranger among its

Yes, alienation from subordinates is not just there, it must be. This does not mean that joint informal events are taboo. In no case! Absolutely normal at corporate parties to drink with subordinates and discuss the new accountant, but the head should leave the party first, not allowing private dances. It is quite natural to be interested in the health of the wife of a subordinate and to make a small gift for the birth of his child, but it is hardly worth accepting an invitation to a bride. Smoking with subordinates - not the place of the head. His place is a smoking room with other leaders.

The leader is always wrong. If the head of rights - see point one

The only way to develop a manager is to always answer the question “What did I do wrong?” According to the results of post-analysis. This analysis should occur both on a regular basis (once in a period to see if the goals of this period have been achieved, if achieved, at what price and set goals for the next period), and after some force majeure. This is a serious test for the psyche, self-motivation and a sense of self of the leaders, not many cope with it. Very often, pseudo-leaders try to justify themselves even to themselves, try to find one out of a dozen possible situations in which their actions would be correct, and try to convince everyone that “he is right, the actions are correct, this is all the fault”. But if you squeeze your teeth and search for an answer to this question, then practice shows that at first the avalanche "well, I am a fool" turns into a stream, then into a trickle, and then simply does not go beyond the boundaries of risky errors. This is called “administrative experience” - the head knowing what one or another of his actions can lead to “intuitively” chooses the necessary scenario for the development of events (remember that leaders are needed precisely for stable development?).

Who am I? Who are these people? Where are they taking me?

Do you want to become a leader? There are two ways - top and bottom. You can rise from the contractor through the operational level to the tactical level, you can descend from the strategic level to the tactical level. The path “from the bottom to the very top” or “from the top to the bottom” is also possible, but this is more an exception than practice. Most of the problems with managers are due to the fact that they jump over levels (well, or they are “jumped over” by careless managers of a higher level). There was a guy a good programmer, built excellent architectural solutions, everyone was after him - on you, boyfriend, department (this is a tactical level), come on, you won! And the good man withered under the drafting of reports, the development of a system of performance indicators, attendance control. Or the head of the department does an excellent job with the department — his people are happy, the projects are on. Come on in the band, man! And after three years, it turns out that there are no effective programmers left in the company, and those that remain are programming on obsolete technologies.

Only the person who is very well versed in the subject area can manage - until the man works as a cleaner, janitor, accountant, lawyer, programmer, tester, project manager, he should not occupy the position of general director of the company!

I hope now I do not need to specifically debunk this steady myth? The higher the level of management, the more risks and not specific tasks fall into the objects of management. A top manager is, in fact, the best risk manager in a company, since he is responsible not only for internal risks (they can be influenced), but also for external risks. Unlike the operating room, which must have the knowledge to perform the specific task itself, if his subordinate is ill and there is no one more to replace.

I offer competition

Write in the comments what problems you have with management, and I will try to determine the cause and give recommendations on how to correct the situation. Perhaps, then the leadership profession will receive its share of respect, and managers will no longer be called leaders?