People and processes

Leadership is about people.

Management is about processes.

Those individuals that truly want to be successful and help themselves, their coworkers, employees and organization grow will use both.

Leadership is the ability to connect with people and influence them toward a central purpose. Leaders are present at multiple levels in and around organizations and teams and some leaders elevate their group while others bring it down.

Ideally, leaders work to improve and bring people up, but that is not always the case. Effective leaders hold high standards and their influence is to raise the bar for performance.

Managers seek to create systems and make things run more smoothly. They seek to understand what is the best way to accomplish a task and then create a system to do it that all the time. In this way, there is little energy wasted and things run smoothly. Unfortunately, this is assuming that there is one way to do things. Most of the time there are numerous ways of accomplishing tasks and the environment is always changing so that the process is evolving. Managers that seek input and are constantly striving to make things better will be successful.

Managers that seek to have operations run smoothly, elicit input from their people and work with them to achieve greatness are the most successful. These are the individuals who have blended their ability manage both their people and their processes.

Power of systems

Yesterday, I was at an event and saw a bunch of people scrambling around to prepare. This particular situation was due, in part, to having new employees who were not fully aware of their responsibilities, but it got me thinking about the value of creating systems.

When an event or a process needs to be completed more than once, and needs to be done the same way, it is wise to create a process for how to do it. This makes it very easy to create consistency, decrease set up and take down time, and systemize the process so that everyone knows how things are going to be done and what needs to be done.

When organizing an athletic event, this includes making sure the floor is clean, the gym is scheduled and blocked off, the bleachers are out, the facility is set up for the sport, the score board is set up and in running order, the referees are scheduled, the benches are set up for home and away teams, there is water available for athletes and other necessary equipment is set up and ready to go.

This can be put down into a checklist to be done the day of, just prior, and at the conclusion of every event for that sport. Once this is created, it should be communicated with all the individuals who are responsible for that sport and copies should be kept in an easily accessible manner.

Having a system in place makes it much easier for everyone involved and allows updates to be done easily, and errors to be evaluated and addressed quickly.