Management seems to attract control freaks in inordinate numbers. My own experience as a control freak was a bit hilarious. I decided that it was time to research my OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) tendencies, and so I went online and ordered three books. Right. Not one book, but three. As I explained this to someone, she just laughed, rolling around on the floor. Ordering three books on obsessive compulsive tendencies seems to confirm the diagnosis before even cracking one of the books, no?

Laugh along with me about that, but being a control freak is not pleasant. For the perpetrator or the victims. Let me make two observations that might get you thinking—as kindly but directly as I can.

Quality vs. Control

One common line of reasoning I frequently hear from control freaks is that they are fixated on quality and unless they act like a control freak, too many things slip through the cracks. It’s as if no one quite measures up to their own standards, and so they’re trapped inevitably in the loop of approvals, sign-offs, corrections, and always touching things at every step. It’s no surprise, then, when they become a bottleneck and get even more frustrated.

This idea that the control freak acts in this manner to preserve quality is really just a ruse, though. Because if they were really that interested in quality, they’d put more systems and processes in place to ensure better quality. No, what’s really happening is that they want control, and so they define the standard as how they would do it (and that can change on a whim).

If you’re really concerned about quality, put the right systems and processes into place, along with the right people, and manage that way. Otherwise you’ll be a bottleneck, and that is frustrating for you and frustrating for them.

In the bigger scheme of things, your standards probably aren’t that important anyway. Frankly, you probably have people noodling the life out of projects, perfecting areas where no one notices except you.

The Terrors of Delegation

Take that bottleneck illustration above: the insistence on seeing everything before it’s approved. What’s really at stake, here? To answer that question, I want you to picture something with me.

Assume that you’re leaving on vacation tomorrow. Given that, what do you think you’d be doing tonight, capping off a long day in the office? We know the answer to that: you’d be putting everything you can in writing for one purpose, and that’s to ensure that people wouldn’t need to bother you on vacation. As a control freak, you’re probably so inundated with detail while you are at work that you really need a break when that vacation rolls around.

So you go on vacation and sure enough, all those notes explaining things worked. No one had to bother you and things went pretty darned well, right? They didn’t need you like they normally do.

But the story doesn’t end there, right? You get back to work and everything goes back to the way it was before. A little bit of chaos. A lot of scurrying around. You touching everything like before, ensuring that things are done well.

Stop for a second and think about this, though. You put everything in writing so that you wouldn’t be bothered. So it stands to reason that you don’t put things in writing because you do want to be bothered! What other explanation could there be?

This explains some of your control freak tendencies and your reticence to put better systems and processes in place: it’s designed so that you are kept inevitably in the loop. That’s an issue for your therapist, really.

David C. Baker lived in Guatemala until he was 18 and now lives in Nashville, TN. In addition to owning a thriving management consulting practice, ReCourses, David is a frequent speaker and author. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Inc. magazine,  Forbes, CBS Business Network, MarketingProfs, BusinessWeek, and dozens of other national publications. He enjoys travel, racquetball, photography, and flying airplanes and helicopters.

I’m guilty of propagating this. The first issue of LeaderLab Papers featured a curated discussion on this difference. The end result of that piece, however, was that the distinction was irrelevant.

And it is irrelevant, completely irrelevant.

Some years ago, management was considered a more inclusive term and included how to lead. Indeed, most literature on management included a discussion of leadership. However, somewhere along the line it was decided that leadership meant change, innovation and improvement. Leaders were idealized, managers scorned.

Most attempts at distinction cite that leaders are responsible for change; managers are responsible for proper use of resources. But what change initiatives are successful without proper use of resources? Further, what attempts at managing better don’t require creating change (called improvements) in how organizations utilize resources? There are few, it any of these examples. The truth is that all leaders find themselves required to develop management and all managers find themselves tasked with leading their team.

If you’re still thinking that you are one and not the other, considering learning a bit about the other. It’ll will make you a much better whatever-you-are.

[I realize this post raises the question, what is the least important question in leadership. Stay tuned for that one.]

David Burkus is the editor of LeaderLab. He speaks, consults and serves on the faculty of management at Oral Roberts University’s College of Business.

Some authors choose to take a “$#%&* kids” approach to writing about the Millennials. They complain about their work ethic, label them with derogatory titles, and back up their opinions with a few anecdotal stories. Espinoza et al resist this urge and differentiate themselves from the growing literature on this subject because of it. They seem to have a deep understanding of this generation and express it extremely well throughout the book.

My one complaint is that they allude to their study but never actually explain the details of their study. I guess they interviewed “good” and “bad” managers, as recommended by HR department. They allude to correlating this information with information from Millennials. But they don’t explain further details. The scholar in me is a tad annoyed by that.

It is a great read, and focuses on pragmatic management solutions. It delicately toes the line between over-simplifying and over-complicating the issue. At the end of the day, the Millennials are still people who have the same needs desires as other generations. But they will express themselves differently, and will expect different things out of their managers, than previous generations did.

I get the feeling the authors truly understand this generation, warts and all, and I highly recommend it to any manager struggling with managing the Millennials.

Tim Vanderpyl is a Certified Human Resource Professional (CHRP) with Canada’s largest catholic healthcare organization. He holds a Master of Arts in Leadership from Trinity Western University and is working toward a Doctorate in Strategic Leadership at Regent University. He can be reached by email here or at his website www.timvanderpyl.com

I’ve started to wonder if that search is in vain.

At the heart of the issue is an attempt to distinguish between those who we call leaders because they run or help run an organization and those who lead groups of followers without a formal organization, without a formal title of any kind. We call a CEO a leader, but also happily give the title to a prominent civic activist. What does this do to our definition?

I’ve started to believe that perhaps the distinction, for the purpose of an operational definition for study and practice, need not be made between leaders and managers. Indeed, few leaders would get very far without management skills, and few managers have room to grow without learning the art of leadership. Instead, we ought to make the distinction where we really feel it – between positional leadership and non-positional leadership.

Positional leadership is the easy one. This is the one senior executives or organizations refer to themselves as, and middle managers read books on in hopes of becoming the aforementioned senior executives. Non-positional leadership is a little different. It is a convoluted reference to the no-title-or-office, yet scores of followers and undeniable influence leaders we often cite as powerful examples of leaders but leave senior executives wondering how to extract lessons from.

Perhaps our study should be a little more refined. Perhaps we should decide prior to study which type of leadership we’re seeking to research. Perhaps as we practice leadership we ought to decide which type of leader we want to be, as both possesses advantages and drawbacks.

Perhaps we need to begin from this distinction.

Exclusive interview with Seth Godin from GiANT Impact on Vimeo.

Human capital is the knowledge, skills, and abilities of your employees. Past research has shown that some of the most important aspects of human capital that drive company strategy and performance are the experiences, education, and training of managers.

This study’s analysis of data from 66 previously published studies found that human capital had a significant and positive impact on global measures of company performance (e.g. ROA and Returns on Sales). The relationship between human capital and performance was strongest when the human capital was firm-specific (e.g. years of experience with a firm) vs. general (e.g. a  stockbroker).  When human capital is general in nature, wages and the threat of turnover are higher because the labor market is more competitive. But specific human capital is more valuable to the performance of your company because it is hard to for you to replace and for your competition to copy.

The study also found that human capital has an even stronger effect on measures of operational performance (e.g. customer service satisfaction, team performance, retention, and innovation).  Operational performance, in-turn, had a strong effect on global measures of company performance. This demonstrates that human capital drives the performance of your company through its effect on operational excellence.  Your company cannot thrive with crappy operations, and your operations cannot thrive without good people.

When I teach the service-profit chain in my MBA classes, my bottom line is that the single most important thing you need to do on a daily basis if you want to grow revenue and profit in your company is to take care of your employees. Inevitably, there are always a few know-it-all managers that smirk when I say this. Like it or not, it’s an empirical fact that your people are the key to success for you and your company.

Take care of your people. Teach them to take care of each other and your customers. Once you develop this very specific human capital in them, don’t treat them like a commodity. Treat them like the performance of your firm depends on them, because it does.

Related Posts At Positive Organizational Behavior:

The Bathtub Metaphor Applied To Human Capital

The Stock And Flow Of Human Capital

Service-Profit Chain: Managers Matter

The first is as a book for a newly minted restaurant or bar manager. Chase has decades of experience and analogies to draw from. The book is a solid compilation of advice for those looking to build a profitable career in hospitality. Chase walks the reader from simple shift manager to a restaurant owner hiring new general managers. In that regard, the book is valuable.

The second is as a book on leadership. From that perspective, the book is lacking. Chase’s contribution is that managers must also act as leaders. In order to reiterate that point, Chase introduces new terms such as “leadagers” and “managementship.” Neither are brand new concepts, although the application of such ideas to hospitality may be. Chase lays out some tips and techniques to bring more leadership on the restaurant floor, but there’s little application evidence or research.

Overall, if you’re a general manager at a bar, restaurant or other hospitality venue, High-Impact Hospitality is worth checking out. If you’re a leader or manager in another industry, you could probably afford to skip the read. However, if you OWN bar, restaurant of even hotel, you should probably click over to Chase’s site (Leadagers.com) and see if he’d be of value to you as a consultant.

“Micromanaging isn’t a dangerous as macroleading.”

There’s a near consensus that micromanaging is gone. Whether you pull from empowerment advocates, motivational models or just plain common sense, individual contributors most often want to be given the right resources, told the objective, and be left alone to work. The exception of course being in the early stages of a new work assignment, when supervision and feedback are needed as part of training. Micromanaging can cause decreased in performance and maybe even increases in turnover.

But is macroleading even more dangerous?

Mintzberg defines Macroleading as when leaders get so focused on setting strategy and vision that they remove themselves from the front lines and eventually develop a vision for the organization so out of touch that the rest of the organization fails to buy in…or worse buys in but is incapable of taking any steps toward realization. Macroleadership sets a vision and hopes that performance toward the objective may occur. Yet, if no one knows where to go, then the leader’s efforts have been futile.

Perhaps Mintzberg is right. Though the temptation is to stay away and not micromanaging, perhaps leaders need to get involved on the front lines, understand what’s realistic, and then begin doing all the fancy stuff we associate with top-level leadership.

What do you think: micromanage or macrolead?

Principles of Scientific Management was first publishing in 1911 by Fredrick Winslow Taylor. While the ideas promoted by Taylor are often criticized, his ideas laid the foundation for the entire genre of management theory and management/leadership literature. Taylor’s work, now in the public domain, if difficult to find in complete form. Principles of Scientific Management is published as the first in LeaderLab’s “lineage” series, which will bring back landmark books in the public domain.

We’re currently working with a distributor to get the book listed on sites such as Amazon.com and BN.com. In the meantime, you can still order the book today direct from our printer, LuLu, here.