What aspiring leaders should know

Give people credit.

All they need from you is the vision, some tools and the freedom to perform. Finally, you must trust that they will perform – within the purview of your superb leadership.

It’s a myth that the concept of managing people is the same as leading people. It is an even bigger myth that micro-managing people is somehow the same as “carefully” leading people. It will serve you well in your future endeavors to embrace and honor this distinction….

To further illustrate, it’s okay to manage projects, work/life balance, stock portfolio, anger, and weight – just not people. It is also perfectly suitable to manage time, budgets, processes, and crises…again, just not people. The closest one should come to managing people should be in the event of a riot or evacuation. But even then, this is often referred to as crowd “control” – an altogether different concept from leading or managing and, thankfully, not a typical scenario in business.

Leaders who inspire, guide, motivate, empower and enable people will achieve great results…outstanding results that will be undoubtedly driven and achieved by the very people with whom they had trust and confidence.

Can you recite the names of today’s successful businesses? Can you truly answer why they are successful? Are they experiencing growth through M&As or do they simply have great leadership? Dig a little deeper and you may find that true leadership has little to do with “managing” people…as is the case with Internet powerhouse Google, which also ranked #1 in Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2007. 

Gary Hamel – management consultant and author of the soon-to-be-released book, The Future of Management – comments on Google in this Wall Street Journal article:

“The Mountain View, Calif., company is packed with intriguing, distinctive ways of running itself, he says. These include radical decentralization; small, self-managing teams; a just-try-it approach to rolling out new products before they are fully finished; and a willingness to let engineers spend sizable chunks of time on offbeat projects.”

Vision. Tools. Freedom. Trust.

Astounding results.