Jean Roberts

The difference – and relationship – between Management and Leadership – and their link with innovation and entrepreneurship.

Managers are expected to achieve agreed objectives with and through people, requiring confidence and skill in:

1. time and task management,
2. trialing and refining of ideas,
3. delegating the right tasks to the right people at the right time in the right way,
4. acquiring and allocating adequate, available and appropriate resources,
5. developing clear policies, procedures and work practices that contribute to continuous quality improvement,
6. performance management and monitoring,
7. effective and efficient support, systems and methods, including technology,
8. ensuring clear and open communication, and
9. negotiating on behalf of her/his areas of responsibility.

Management is a combination of:

1. ensuring job satisfaction for the manager’s staff, and
2. meeting the demands of their own role – and those of their staff – in the organisation.

Leaders are expected to demonstrate the ability to inspire others to work together as a team, following her/his lead in order to attain a common objective, involving:

1. interpersonal skills, including listening, questioning, observing, communicating,
2. willingness to learn as well as lead,
3. ability to relate effectively to a variety of behaviours, personalities, contexts and constraints,
4. commitment to building and maintaining relationships,
5. understanding the willingness, ability and commitment of ‘followers’ (you cannot be a leader if others are not prepared or willing to follow your lead), and
6. acceptance of limitations.

 Leadership is a combination of:

1. productivity, and
2. innovation.

The one person can be Manager, Leader – and Innovator:

Managers are involved with what, how, when, how much, at what cost, and with what benefit/return. 

Innovators are involved with what else, how different, why this, why now, why us.  Innovation styles can include conceptual, logical, technical, inspirational, and/or back-to-the-wall, ie desperation or survival! 

The essential ingredient for creativity is the connection between thought and emotion. There is no more powerful force than this. You can become excited, angry, concerned, interested, confused, desperate, traumatised, fulfilled, exhilarated in an instant response to a thought – what you are experiencing is the triggering of a creative response

A common myth about innovation is that innovation is only about new or different ‘things’.   Innovation can also be about improving, changing – or even doing away with – existing ‘things’.

Innovation is a combination of ‘Management’ and ‘Leadership’

Entrepreneurs are involved with management, leadership and innovation.   In their book The Innovation Formula – how organisations turn change into opportunity,  published in 1988 by Ballinger Publishing Company, Michael Robert and Alan Weiss state that entrepreneurs are often viewed as ‘business swashbucklers who catapult new ideas into public prominence while they storm the walls of the establishment’.   However with the benefit and wisdom of their 20 years of research, these authors present a very different picture with their descriptive yet prescriptive statement that they found ‘true entrepreneurs aren’t pirates, but disciplined sailors who anticipate the winds and tides of change’.   Disciplined sailors actively demonstrate the qualities of a manager, leader and innovator in demonstrating entrepreneurship.

Jean’s article Understanding the relationship between Entrepreneurship, Creativity and Innovation can be downloaded free of charge from this website.

We know that ‘Management’, ‘Leadership’, ‘Innovation’ and ‘Entrepreneurship’ can be studied separately.  However, in the day-to-day practical challenges associated with any business, they are very closely related – and sometimes so closely related that they are difficult to separate.  

Creativity

There is a process of creativity, and it’s possible for any person to be creative.

Some of us create conceptually: others technically. Some create easily: others with effort. Some create visually – dreaming dreams and seeing visions: others through research – digging into facts, gathering opinions or examples, examining case studies, and comparing statistics.

It’s possible – and highly desirable – to schedule creativity into your work schedule, in the same way that you schedule ‘paying accounts’ into your work schedule. To do so, requires an understanding of the process of creativity.

Two wonderful quotes from Victor Hugo:

• There is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come
• A stand may be made against the invasion of an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea

Final thoughts from Jean in preparation for Making Ethics Work:

• There is an art and science to making ethics work – and to determining whether, how, and how best this begins and ends with Management and Leadership
• Art is the ‘doing’ of making ethics work – the practical tools and strategies that will be provided in the Ethics Toolkit
• Science is the ‘understanding’ of what makes ethics work – the clear theoretical framework that will ensure the Ethics Toolkit’s usefulness in improving your workplace behaviours, job satisfaction and performance as an entrepreneurial SME or Nonprofit Organisations.