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, according to Mark Stevens, the author of Extreme Management,  "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."

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... More

Balance between Authority and Employee Empowerment

Effective leadership demands a delicate balance between laissez-faire and overly controlling styles.

"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... More