by Peter A. Arthur-Smith, Leadership Solutions, Inc.®

“We underestimate the power of words and metaphors in our obsessive pursuit of numbers.”

    Managers are captivated by projecting, planning, organizing, directing and controlling. All these steps are articulated in terms of numbers. There’s no doubt we need some of this in order to pay our bills, meet salary expectations, determine our profit margins, and to attract and retain our stockholders. All of these terms are known as management-speak.

On the other hand, leaders are captivated by envisioning, positioning, engaging, collaborating and orchestrating. All these phases are usually conveyed in terms of words or metaphors. We require a great deal of these to energize our people, captivate our customers-donors-constituents, and attract and retain investors. All of these terms are known as leadership-speak.

The reality is that we need both. However, the real question is: ‘Do we tilt our way of communicating toward one or the other?’ It’s tough to retain a perfect balance in anything, which is probably the homeostasis that would bring us the greatest performance advantage. Your writer asks this question of executives on a regular basis and, more often than not, his respondents usually opt for leadership-speak when they are aware of the differences. And yet, when they return to their organizations, they readily slip back into management-speak. Why is this?

A lot has to do with cultural conditioning. Even though we may instinctively opt for leadership speak, our workplace cultural conditioning over the past 100 years pushes us toward management-speak. Sad to say that, while most executives revel in management-speak, it is almost irrelevant and not terribly inspiring for their people. It’s pretty much like pouring water on a duck’s back, which agitates executives when they realize their people are somewhat shrugging off their exhortations.

By and large, it’s only the people who indulge in such management-speak who are promoted; so the whole genre is self -reinforcing and perpetuated. Our same contrarian devotion to management-speak is rather similar to a communication phenomenon: where your writer has noted, by means of an insightful survey, how apparently successful married couples or partners tend to choose people somewhat opposite to themselves. Despite that, in their work life, they are inclined to join forces with people who are more like themselves. This latter factor often kills new ideas from flourishing over time because it encourages group think. Their work environment becomes rather banal. No wonder once younger, flourishing organizations with diverse personalities eventually fall flat and drift.

It’s time for us to break this counter-intuitive behavior, if we seriously want our organizations to grow and prosper. Your writer has worked with work-pairs, threesomes and small teams, where personalities are purposely complementary, and, while it created some initial challenges for such groupings, the richness of their output and working together created some terrific outcomes. All in all, the overall effect is to give such enterprises a boost in momentum; in some cases as much as 20% or more. Teaming activities like this are perfectly in sync with leadership-speak, since leadership is more about people and progress and management tends to be more about systems and process.

What’s even more noticeable is where managers tend to throw money and resources at work situations to improve performance, whereas leaders just turn up the level of people engagement to enhance results… and that doesn’t cost money. To make the point: your writer was just reading a New York Times Sports article – June, 2018 – entitled, “With the Game Half Over, The Warriors Are Starting” by Marc Stein and Scott Cacciola. The Warriors of course refers to the Golden State Warriors, who have arrived at the NBA Championship finals for their fourth consecutive year. It points out how the Warriors handle their 15 minute half-time break and come out with an explosive run into their third quarter?

Writers Stein and Cacciola noted that they couldn’t put their finger on a precise factor that create such runs; possibly they were looking for a cut-and-dried management formula. Even the players themselves were mystified. However, they noticed Steve Kerr, Warriors coach, huddle with his assistants for the first 3-4 minutes in another area than the players; leaving the latter to take care of their phone messages and personal stuff. Then Kerr and the assistants join the team for about 5 minutes sharing coaching thoughts, mainly positive game clips from the first two quarters, and giving players an opportunity to share their observations – including on-court intelligence about their opponent’s tactics. With 6 minutes to go they are back on court again in their wind-up for the third quarter with practice shots.

Judging from team player quotes like – “Everybody is a leader here,” or “It’s open for us, from 1-15 –anybody can say something” – it’s clear Kerr takes a leadership approach. He doesn’t rant and rave at his players, despite a possible disappointing first half, and he emphasizes the positive plays. As one player pointed out in the article: ‘In his 15 year NBA career, he had played for nine different head coaches and had never been part of a more democratic locker room.’ In this player’s case, he had probably experienced eight management-speak coaches and one leadership oriented one. The ratio is quite illuminating isn’t it?

    While it’s clearly possible from the many coach rants that we hear about, which gain a short term lift in performance through management speak; combined with extrinsic drivers like competition, incentives, goals, fear, accountability and measurement; once you remove such speak, things usually grind to a halt or you have to up the ante. However, with leadership speak, continuous top performance – like the Warriors – is perpetuated with the use of intrinsic motivators; like a compelling purpose, mutual respect, tangible progress, enjoyable team-play, genuine empowerment and building competence. Because these are all intrinsic forces, they appeal to your people’s instincts and level of trust, consequently induce a sustained boost in performance…especially in difficult situations. And what can be more challenging than a play-off final for a celebrated championship.

So the question is: Are you willing to act against the prevailing management-speak tide? Are you willing to change your daily, weekly, monthly and yearly working principles? A breakthrough is possible if you can largely deflect the constant drum-beat of management-speak. Maybe your entity needs an evolving, leadership-speak revolution, since radical revolutions usually score too many innocent casualties; like layoffs, wage-cuts, discarding human capital and general organizational upheaval.

Good luck with such efforts. Once you get the ball rolling in the right way, you will be surprised at how quickly momentum is gained and sustained. You could be the next Steve Kerr in your field.

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