TOO MUCH LEADERSHIP, TOO LITTLE MANAGEMENT
After his election victory, President Obama was widely hailed as a visionary leader who would deliver meaningful change. Expectations soared as people chanted: “Yes we can!” But what do the first seven months of his presidency tell us about leadership and change? Perhaps we aren’t as gung-ho for change as we once thought. Perhaps the level of risk we are willing to accept to accomplish change has changed.
Regardless of the causes of the current economic crisis, watching our homes lose trillions in value and our retirement plans fall to half their value has diminished our appetite for change. Our tolerance for bold innovation evaporated roughly six million lost jobs ago. As citizens, we are changing our behaviors to spend less and save more, and are increasingly worried that the government is spending too much. So worried that we would rather not have another economic stimulus even if it means a slower recovery from the recession. We aren’t so sure about policing the world in far-away places – the Afghanistan war is looking more like the Iraq quagmire every day. We want to improve the health care system, but not if it adds to a trillion dollars to a run-away annual deficit. Reducing global warming also sounds like a good idea, but let’s slow down and get it right the first time. “Yes, we can” was an invigorating chant a year ago, but what if we can’t? Or worse yet, what if we shouldn’t?
President Obama seems to have relinquished management control of health care reform, climate control, and energy policy to Congress. He is more comfortable marketing grand visions than with the messy details of managing change. Managing change is hard – and in government it’s really hard! Even when he issues directives to implement campaign promises (closing the terrorist prison in Guantanamo, for example), nothing happens until someone comes up with an executable plan, negotiates compromise, and pays attention to the details – in short, old-fashioned management execution. Implementation of the “Cash For Clunkers” program is another example of a good idea poorly executed.
The difference between lofty ideals and effective execution is the difference between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Despite a cabinet and White House staff with impressive credentials, President Obama has outsourced management to Congress (less than a paragon of management excellence by anyone’s standards) while he delivers speeches around the country. Allowing Congress to develop a flawed stimulus bill was forgivable – we needed a bill quickly and could fix mistakes later. But that strategy with respect to health care reform has spawned health care bills (as of this writing there are several) that fail to contain, let alone reverse, the rising costs of treatment while adding an expensive mandate that everyone be insured. What can President Obama do? Come down from his cloud and start managing the government as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) that he is.
My point is not to bash a president who is working hard to meet the commitments he made to the American people. When I was CEO of my company, I fell into the same trap – albeit not on an international level. I set lofty goals without an executable plan. I pronounced high performance targets without having the resources to achieve them. I issued directives to my management team without establishing boundaries or measures of success. You may be doing the same things in your organization too.
As a management consultant, it’s heresy to say I’m tired of hearing about leadership – where is management? I believe a large part of today’s crisis was caused by inadequate management at the highest levels. Visionary leadership has become disconnected from plain old management execution. We got off-track by believing: “It’s more important to do the right things than to do things right.” The logic of that statement is understandable – but if we don’t do things right, doing the right things still leads to failure. Some executives use that statement to justify detaching themselves from the hard work of day-to-day management. They delegate management to lower levels that too often don’t share the vision, don’t have a plan, and/or don’t have adequate resources to pursue the lofty goals. We have too much leadership and too little management. Instead of separating leadership from management, executives must be both managers and leaders. Used together, leadership and management produce measurable results. One without the other either produces nothing, or produces the wrong things. Are you both leading and managing change in your organization?
