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Why Balance?
Balance
is a key element of a
happy life
and
sustainable business.
Balance is about how you live your life and
manage your business and people.
When
your life or
business is out of balance,
nothing works...
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Balanced
Manager
We all start our careers as
specialists – men and women with narrow corridors of functional expertise.
The goal of specialists is to optimize individual effort. But
"to raise to the ranks of senior management, you must build
cross-functional expertise and forgo this quest for personal
perfection, seeking instead to balance the skills and capabilities of the
specialists working for you," writes Mark Stevens.2
Effective
managerial leadership
demands a delicate balance between sensitivity and authority,
between the whole and the parts, between
loose and tight leadership style,
between functional expertise (depth of knowledge) and
cross-functional
excellence (width of knowledge), internal (creating value for
organization and employees) and external (creating value for
investors,
customers, and
society as a whole). It also demands balancing
the art and science of management as
well as
innovation and tradition.
To
manage knowledge workers effectively in the modern
knowledge-driven enterprise,
modern
manager should balance
management
with
leadership and
coaching to keep all these independent thinkers pointed in the same
direction and working towards the same goal...
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Balance between Authority and
Employee Empowerment
Effective
leadership demands a delicate balance between laissez-faire and overly
controlling styles.
Loose-Tight Leadership
"Tilting too far toward a majority vote democracy, the
manager becomes reluctant to exercise sufficient force necessary to propel
the company toward its goals," says Harvard Business School professor
Michael Beer. "This creates an organizational bereft of leadership. In such
an environment, management fails to coordinates the various components of
the enterprise and, in turn, fails to harness the positive factors inherent
in the conflict between operating units (such as credit versus sales or
technology versus human resources). Ironically, what appears to authorize an
exceptional level of personal freedom and flexibility turns out to be a
trap. Call it the paradox of
empowerment."2
Yin-Yang of Employee Empowerment
Leadership-Management Synergy
To maximize your long-term success you should
strive to be both a manager and a leader and to
synergize their functions.
Merely possessing management skills is no longer sufficient for success as
an executive in
today's business world. You need to understand the differences between
managing and leading and know how to integrate the two roles to achieve
organizational success...
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