leading or managing - chairpersons versus CEOs

Had the pleasure of browsing through the latest World Business magazine over my morning coffee wherein I found a wee article about the tasks of a chairman - The top chairs.

Actually it was more of a book review for an upcoming book by Andrew and Nada Kakabadse, "Leading the Board: The Six Disciplines of World Class Chairmen".

What piqued my interest was the obvious: While the CEO is mired in the command & control structure and thus focused on managing, the chairman has to rely on pure leadership without managing (except getting the board members to be on time and get somebody to write the minutes of course).

And as you might have gleaned from a few earlier posts I'm not fond of managing and it's mother; the command & control hierarchy. Leadership on the other hand, well, that we need. More of that and less of the former please - but that's not easy, leading is harder than ordering.

The book's six disciplines are three too many for my short attention span, but three I could easily see as result of the others.

That left three important ones, here slightly skewed by my attitude:

Sensemaking.

Clarify the whys, communicate and champion the strategy and values. The values being the framework and the strategy the map - without absolute clarity and thorough understanding throughout an organisation the rest is moot. That does make sense does it not?

Live the values.

Without trust and integrity no leadership will happen, and with no leadership nothing happens. And as I often say, trust equals transparency - and in this case transparency would be rather counterproductive without integrity. One could easily say that this requires a matching personality - strong sense of values, integrity and transparency. That's a tough set of requirements, requires some self confidence that.

Influence outcomes.

Convince, communicate and focus. No "orders" allowed, the meaning of the ideas must be clear, the important questions shall be identified and the value of the actions must be plain. One is working with free will here.

Note the argument that the chairperson historically had a more important role than generally perceived today given the widespread visibility of CEOs. But now it seems that the chairperson's importance is increasing again, if the roles are split at all that is. And split they should be in my humble opinion.

Methinks that the increase of a chairperson's importance is a result of the slow erosion of the rigid organisational hierarchies thanks to the ubiquitous networking, like blogs and wikis and the rest of it. A shift from managing to leadership again, makes me happy that.

Comments

[Balaji Sowmyanarayanan]

Sig,
There is a lot of parallel between a live human and a live biz.
The Chair/CEO has parallels to Intent and Action at individual level.
The command and control hierarchy is parallel to moral system. They work to some extent. Their functionality is more as a support structure.
Zen and Zen masters help individuals transcend( the support structure) and let intelligence flourish.
If you want to free the biz from the command and control/hierarchy - is Sig/Thingamy Zen? How? Why? Why not?
Or how can you effect biz liberation with/because of Thingamy?

-Balaji S.

[sig]

Balaji,

excellent point that! Must study...

But as for Zen on cannot "push" anybody into liberation from the C&C structures (that in itself wold be C&C!) - so thingamy is in fact a replacement but when building a Business Model you can virtualise the good old C&C hierarchy for the sake of "I'm used to it" or "still don't believe we can live without it" or "are you nuts or what?".
Then when using it perhaps find out one day that you actually do not need those titles and business rules and Monday morning meetings or...

Prepare the environment and let it happen by itself is always to be preferred me thinks!