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  • 1.  Nerns

    Posted 11-12-1999 02:32
    Thu, 11 Nov 1999 Glenn Rowe wrote Re: Managers versus Leaders
    >
    >Jack Ring
    >
    >I mostly agree with you but would like you to justify your thoughts that
    >leadership is part of management.
    [...]
    [JR] I will be happy to try. In parallel it might be useful if you or
    someone else justified that leadership is not part of management.

    I come from two angles.

    One angle considers all the purposes and behaviors that must be "actioned"
    in an enterprise. That is, everything required to score well on Drucker's
    main measures of market standing, productivity, innovation and liquidity.
    In my lexicon these include: ethics, envisioning, pursuit of quality and
    cycle time as well as net income, enthusing others, risk taking, planning,
    supervising, serving others, variance suppression, administration, enjoying
    others, celebrating, reflecting, learning and learning to learn. These are
    not all the items but enough to illustrate where I'm coming from. In my
    view this collection of actions, or at least the responsibility for them
    needs a label. Let's call this collection a NERN. Let's call
    accomplishing these actions NERNING. And lets say that a person who does
    most of these can be called A NERNER.

    Because I was at an impressionable age when GE in the 1950's and Drucker in
    the 60's and others used the label Management, Managing and Manager for
    that collection I tend to equate NERN with Manage.

    Along comes the leadership chorus and wants to emphasize the importance of
    Vision and Spirit and a few other facets of NERNING. Well, I think, if
    Leadership is the label for part of the collection. What is the label for
    the remaining parts. And when I witness them saying the rest is management
    but also witness them specifying that Management is only what I call
    administration and supervision (so they can glorify Leadership?) I wonder
    what happened to all the other facets.

    Having witnessed Berzerkely in the 60's I am sensitive to the Angela
    Davis's of the world who teach "Cause Riding for your own agendas." George
    Orwell warned us of Doublespeak in "1984" and was only off by 10 years as
    it turns out.

    I think the second angle is important as well. It concerns inspiring
    people toward their personal best -- to excel at their Knowing, Doing and
    Being triad. Also, understanding the awesome power of using the right or
    wrong word when they are looking to you for purpose, possibilities,
    guidance, encouragement, admonishment, empathy and hope. To tell any one
    of these people that they are "Manager" and not "Leader material" is an
    exercise in hanging labels on people that is extremely pre-destructive.
    Although others may be excused for such clumsiness, management education
    and development practitioners cannot be excused.

    So if you need to differentiate Leadership, Leading and Leader from the
    rest of the collection, go ahead. This is a free community. But please
    don't circumscribe a minor subset of the rest and call it Management,
    Managing, Manager.

    Accordingly, my lexicon says that the label for the overall collection is
    the M word and that Leaderhip must be a subset.

    To those who need the terms to be parallel or management a subset of
    leadership I simply ask -- where did you put Ethics and where did you put
    Serving Others?
    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

    On Thu, 11 Nov 1999 Michael CHUMER wrote Re: Manager(manager(manager))
    [...]>
    >Their situational embeddedness is key to grasp and understand. I have seen
    >as most have that some managers are terrible leaders

    [JR] Please clarify the criteria you use to call them Managers but not Leaders?

    >as well as some
    >leaders being terrible managers.

    [JR] Please clarify the criteria you use to call them Leaders but not Managers?

    [JR] And what do you call them if they can do both?

    >Embarking upon education/training in an
    >attempt to "homogenize" the manager into becoming more of a leader or a
    >leader becoming more of a manager may prove futile.

    [JR] May? OK, May. But what of your responsibility for Type 1 and Type 2
    errors in unilaterally classifying a person as Manager or Leader?

    >Rather an
    >understanding that different situations require different behaviors and
    >those behaviors ( managerial, leader, etc.) may not be embodied within a
    >single functioning self.

    [JR] May not be? Are you willing to assert, Cannot be?


    [JR] Why don't we just agree on an ontology -- that there are people,
    competencies, behaviors, roles and needs? If we could do this maybe we
    could agree that leader is a role not a person and that leading is a
    behavior and that leadership is both a capability and a need.

    Then we could talk about the other 5/7ths of NERNING and enterprise.

    Jack Ring
    Innovation Management
    32712 N. 70th St., Snottsdale, AZ 85262-7143
    Office) 480-488-4615, Cell) 602.369.4615, Fax) 480-488-4616
    Where all think alike, no one thinks very much. (Walter Lippman)


  • 2.  Nerns

    Posted 11-12-1999 09:08
    At 12:31 AM 11/12/1999 -0700, you wrote:
    >Accordingly, my lexicon says that the label for the overall collection is
    >the M word and that Leaderhip must be a subset.
    >
    >To those who need the terms to be parallel or management a subset of
    >leadership I simply ask -- where did you put Ethics and where did you put
    >Serving Others?

    I've already posted on this, so I'll be brief, but I'd really like to
    understand why Ethics and Serving Others can be placed with management as
    the set, but not if leadership is the set. If we can carry out the
    discussion using only your lexicon it would probably be consistent, but the
    valididty of the lexicon is terribly important to the whole discussion. Is
    there a problem with ethical leadership but not ethical management? Please
    help me understand your statement. It sounds very important.



    Dick Copeland
    The Copeland Group
    Consulting with Churches,
    Non-Profits,
    and Families in Business
    San Antonio, Texas
    210-656-9349


  • 3.  Nerns

    Posted 11-12-1999 09:59
    Hmmm.

    In his book entitled "We have never been modern" Bruno Latour writes about
    epistemologies that support ontologies that value the either/or. Either
    there exists a set of universals or there doesn't exist such a set. Either
    a reality exists out there in the world OR one exists in subjective
    formulations. It all depends upon the perspective of individual qua
    researcher.

    To suggest that the construct of NERN is best understood by developing a
    series of labels or that the need for labels is vital to the understanding
    of NERN underlies an ontological position that seeks universals in order
    to understand. It is a position that Burrel and Morgan place squarely in
    the logical- positivism grid. From that platform the labels can then be
    compartmentalized as factors of a construct in order to perform such neat
    cartesian tricks such as factor analysis, descriptive statistics, and/or
    inferential statistics. Underlying that entire investigative framework is
    the value of hypothesis testing and the inherent cautions of type I and
    type II errors. I do not characterize managers and leaders into universal
    boxes or labels because to my way of thinking they are both subsumed under
    human behavior. In a similar fashion I shrug off type I and type II errors
    as being meaningless to my research and suspect in sociological research
    in general. Therefor my statement in a previous post that they (
    management or leadership) are embedded in situations suggests that
    whatever they are emerges from the situation itself not from a set of
    universals. I am sure that there will be many who disagree or agree with
    my perception and I have the utmost respect for those who disagree with
    where I am coming from.

    Yet even my position is suspect cause in "verbing" phenomena ( managing
    and leading) the situation may cause ontological oscillation causing one
    to draw on epistemologies that shift between a reality space that is both
    out there ( in the objective world) and in here ( the subjective world).
    Latour handles that situation by looking at phenomena as a hybrid and
    further suggests that it grows not in a cartesian manner but as a rhizome
    whose shape and form evolves as the situation progresses.

    My point is simply this if we treat management, leadership, NERNs or
    whatever as a set of labels ( universals) one being a subset of the other
    then we will be locked into a discussion that just touches the surface of
    managing and/or leading.

    Yet I am enjoying the discussion in this thread and find the variety of
    perspectives to be both interesting and enlightening.

    Have a nice weekend, all.

    Mike Chumer