Comments on: Is Your Leadership Style a Bottleneck to Creativity?

By: Jeff Hajek

Jeff Hajek — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:29:38 +0000

Lucky,

Right. The more people working on improvement, the faster it will go. Leaders should focus on being mentors and coaches rather than “doers”.

Just make sure that leaders don’t delegate the responsibility to hit targets to their team. They need to retain that for themselves.

Thanks for your thoughts.
Jeff

By: Lucky

Lucky — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 10:42:15 +0000

I think the thrust of the article is that lean leadership is akin to more delegation of improvement initiatives responsibiities to subordinates such that there is a greater chance for success at the end of the day. I enjoyed the article. Thank you Jeff.

By: Jeff Hajek

Jeff Hajek — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 15:37:00 +0000

Stuart,

I look at leadership and management as two different features, like eye color and hair color, not like two different colors of hair. While a job title may say “Team Leader” or “Plant Manager”, in truth, every person in every job typically has some sort of leadership responsibility and some sort of management responsibility.

There is, however, both formal leadership (CEO) and informal leadership (the alpha male in a group of friends). This article is talking specifically about formal leadership positions.

Of note, being in charge of a team requires both management and leadership. A boss needs to lead the team to inspire them and motivate them, but also needs to manage them–review performance, track attendance and sick days, etc. The best bosses are good at both managing and at leading.

Thanks for the comments.
Jeff

By: Stuart Fisher

Stuart Fisher — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 15:25:34 +0000

I agree with a lot of what you highlight in your various articles, however, this one leaves me confused???
Over the last 25 years, I have been very fortunate to work as both consultant and employee with blue-chips and tiny SMEs, internationally and in a variety of industries. The one thing that is remarkably consistent is a misunderstanding about the differences between leadership and management. Leaders are nothing to do with hierarchy whilst managers (management) is the heirarchy. Most large companies retain a pyramid structure because behavioural change/operating culture takes longer to get completely right (i.e. from the titular head to the shop floor) than a charismatic, inspiring front-man has in the job. Gifted leaders will always find a way to success because their peers intuitively know to support and follow … there are many managers however that become bottlenecks and have to be worked around (cf Peter principle) as an operational challenge … their peers and subordinates take the path of least resistance. Anyway, bottom line is … managers don’t work enough ‘on’ the system because they are pre-occupied with completing tasks ‘in’ the system (cf Deming’s SPK).
Hope this is an interesting addition.

By: Il meglio della blogosfera lean #6

Il meglio della blogosfera lean #6 — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 06:39:35 +0000

[...] Is Your Leadership Style a Bottleneck to Creativity? dal blog Gotta Go Lean di Jeff Hajek: Il tuo stile di leadership rende dipendente la tua organizzazione dalle tue decisioni? Ecco come riconoscerlo e cosa fare per responsabilizzare i tuoi dipendenti… (traduzione automatica) [...]