Perry Maughmer

Welcome to the Potential Leader Lab. And I'm your host, Perry Maughmer. Newsflash. Leadership is overrated. I think I could stop there and just leave it at that. Fill in the blanks, figure it out for yourself. You agree? You disagree? It doesn't matter. But my thinking has evolved as it should. And I've you know, I started off a while back with a with a brand called Relentless Leadership. Then I moved to Potential Leader Lab and now I am committed to create something I call manage to lead so we can truly create opportunities for people and organizations to address the real issue that I believe. Is the challenge most of us face when we're talking about leadership. And that's creating an ecosystem for people to grow into effective organizational managers as the first step in leading. Now management. I'm going to define these two really quickly just to set the stage management, the coordination and administration of tasks to achieve a goal. Leadership, the ability of an individual or a group of people to influence and guide followers or members of an organization, society or team. Tell me how those are different. I will tell you that right now. I've talked to tons of people over the last eight years about leadership, which really is the reason that I started. Some of the stuff that I do is trying to trying to come up with, I guess you'd call it, answers systems processes to develop people into leaders.

Perry Maughmer

And over the last two years specifically, I've ran through programs that I created to help people evolve into leaders. And then over the past six months, as I listened to people talk. I realized we weren't actually talking about leadership. We were talking about management. We're talking about how to run a business. In the I think the main challenge is we get there's this in my mind, an artificial kind of dichotomy that's been created between those two things. Okay. And if you ask ten people to define leadership, well, first of all, you're going to get blank stares because they're going to mumble their way through something. But nobody has a clear shared definition of leadership. There's so many out there. And it's kind of like I think it was Potter Stewart was a Supreme Court justice in the 60s who talked about pornography and said, I can't define it, but I'll tell you when I see it. And I think that's leadership. And I don't think there's any actually anything wrong with that because I think leadership is highly qualitative. Right? It's not really quantitative. That's more management. And so leadership is really dependent upon organizations. It's dependent on culture and mission and vision and values. And a lot of those things because the style of leadership at different companies will be different as it should be.

Perry Maughmer

The style of management really isn't or shouldn't be, because there are certain fundamentals of management that transcend organizations and industry. Now, I will tell you the other thing that I've become really passionate about is if you're quote unquote, first of all, there is no there is no job title of leader. Like nobody walks around all day leading it. Just nobody needs that right, in my opinion. And as I've said for years, I just I said it, but I didn't really listen to myself. Management is what we do. Leadership is how we do it. So management is quantitative, leadership is qualitative. Now, I will tell you that I've seen plenty of organizations where there are people that are theoretically leading that don't give any thought to management, and it is maddening and costly to organizations. There has to be a blend of both. And quite honestly, if you had to tell me you make a choice between the two. I'll pick management over leadership all day long. And that's because at least that company will make money. It'll be around tomorrow, the next day, the next year. The other side of this is and people argue, they want to say, well, you know, you can be a good manager and not a good leader. I think that's bullshit. I think if you listed the qualities and skills and capabilities and traits and characteristics of great managers, I would be hard pressed to think if you create that list of a great manager, not a good manager, a great manager, that person also wouldn't be inclined to be a great leader.

Perry Maughmer

It certainly buys him the time. Now, if you flip that around and say somebody's a great leader, but they're a lousy manager, how much time does the organization have? And I would tell you, not much. Because people that think only of the big picture, only of strategy, only of whatever the things are that you think leaders do, especially people who want to rely on their charisma or personality to be a great leader. They're going to run the organization into the ground with no management. And by the way, who's telling who's teaching everybody to be a great manager? Because, again, management is what makes money. Management is what provides value and organizations. It's when you say it's a well-run company, that's management. Management. Just remember, management is what creates value, not leadership. That's my opinion. And I think it plays out if you actually do the math. It isn't an either or. It has to be both. And again, I look at this and I look at many things like on a continuum, right? So if you think of a continuum, just draw a straight line on a piece of paper. But management on one side and leadership on the other. Anybody in an organization moves up and down that line.

Perry Maughmer

Perry Maughmer

And I think talking about people that are visionary as different than people that are managers is also a disservice to people. It creates it's artificial. Like it doesn't exist. We've done we've we've tried to make it more complex than it needs to be because nobody's job is purely leading an organization. It makes no sense at all. What do you do if that's all you do? You just walk around creating work for people. Nobody needs that. And plus, if you do it too often, you're giving everybody in the in the company whiplash because it's a it's a bunch of great ideas. And again, nobody needs that. At some point we have to execute. In execution. Great execution is better than a great idea. I'd rather have an average idea with excellent with excellent execution than a fantastic idea and poor execution. Don't take my word for it. Look up stuff from Bening and Drucker and all those guys. Right, Bennett? Yeah. Warren Bennis. Sorry, I'm not Benny. Warren Bennis and Peter Drucker. Just look it up. They say the same thing. We just didn't listen. We get enamored with. For some reason, we get enamored with leadership. We get enamored with charisma. We get enamored with vision. We get enamored with strategy. As humans, we love it. We just want to talk about it endlessly. We can drone on about it.

Perry Maughmer

I contributed to it. I've contributed to it for years. Leadership. Leadership. Leadership. It's not unimportant. It just isn't a solution. And I figured that out because all the folks that I've put together programs for and they go through and I ask them when they're done, how did it work? And they're like, Yeah, yeah. I mean it was great. We learned a lot, but we can't. But the problem is for me, what I defaulted back to is my managerial experience, which is we can't measure it. Like we never know. We can't we can't just say, yes, we did this and I and I have a I have a I'm better than when I started. We can say we're qualitatively better. Like we feel better. We're having different conversations. That's all great. But what are we actually doing differently that's producing more value for the organization after all that time and money that we've spent? And that's that's the part I think stuck out for me. The part that didn't align with what I wanted to do. I wanted to see organizations have greater value from their time. And so for me, it is it's all about management. And I think to tell people that, well, we have people in the organization to create vision and then other people who just execute is a disservice because at every level in an organization, there's vision.

Perry Maughmer

There's a vision for executing the plan. And when we tell people that vision, creating vision, creating strategy is exclusive to certain pieces of the organization, what are we telling everybody else? Oh, just do. Well, a lot of people, again, we create these artificial dichotomies. Okay, If I'm doing, then I'm not thinking. I don't need to think. I just need to do. Here's your here's your plan. Just execute the plan that's not serving anybody. There has to be vision at every level in the organization. Now, the time frame is different and the scope is different. But I still want to have that creativity for people at certain levels. I want them to be able to say, okay, here's the goal for your part of the organization. I want you to create. I want you to create the vision for how you're going to achieve that. That aligns with our overall organizational vision. I never want to have just everybody doing what they're told. We decided already what the vision is. Now you just execute. You can't do that because everybody has to understand how am I going to execute it? They have to have creativity and innovation at every level. And if we're somehow exclusively carving that out and saying, okay, only certain people need to worry about innovation and creativity. Because essentially that's what creating strategy and vision is.

Perry Maughmer

It's creativity and. Insight. I want people to think creatively at every level in the organization. I want them to feel engaged with unique and interesting ideas to make us better, to get us closer to our goal. And we can't do that if we're if we're kind of artificially carving out certain pieces of the organization saying, okay, this is only these people need to have good ideas. And I don't believe it. And I also the other side of this is I believe it removes responsibility from the people in the organization to think about how it's going to be executed. And people start believing that all I have to do is swing in here and have a great idea, and then somebody else is going to figure out how to do it. That's bullshit. That's not work. Everybody can have great ideas. Great ideas. Quite honestly, great ideas are a dime a dozen. Now, if you want to have an idea that you can execute on, that's different. If you've actually figured out in your organization what it's going to take from a resource standpoint being people, time and money, and there's some conceptualization of that. So you can have an intelligent conversation with your team and, and walk them through your thought process of how it's going to work and why it's valuable and how the clients are going to react and what it's going to require of the people that work there.

Perry Maughmer

Okay, That's awesome. But if you just come in with a with a great idea and say, hey, this is what I want to do now, and then you leave. How does that work? How does that make anybody in the organization feel good? It's like, Oh, okay, now we're doing this okay, until a week from Tuesday when you swing back in and say, I have a new idea. I have another new idea. Nobody needs that. We need to stop with that with the madness of that kind of thought process. We need to stick with an idea. It amazes me because most of the time when we have an idea or we have a new process or we have an initiative and an organization, it's again lack of management. Because if we if we have an idea and we plan it out and we execute it and we start it. Then the question is when are we measuring its impact? What's the frequency, what's the cadence for that? And if we have this great idea that's going to transform the industry and transform our company, how are we measuring the impact and at what level are we going to do that and how often are we going to do that and when do we say, okay, when do we call it done? When do we when can we sit around a table and go, okay, we've got all of the data we need.

Perry Maughmer

Now we can say it's been truly effective. It's increased our revenues decreased our costs. By the way, which are the only two things you really need to worry about. If any new ideas got to do one or both of those. Because if it doesn't do one or both of those, then it's decreasing the bottom line. I don't know of anybody who wants a strategy that does that because at some point, every strategy, every vision, every new idea, every innovation has to make us better. And in context of better in most for profit companies means I make more money. We can't lose sight of that. So there's only two levers to pull. I increase revenue, decrease cost. Let's not make this too difficult. And if somebody has an idea that does neither of those, it's not a very good idea. And so we have to create that in an organization. So we have to we have to figure out, okay, this is how long it's going to take us to implement that idea. And by this time we'll actually be able to collect data. And then we want to figure out, okay, is three months long enough? Should it be, then we'll measure it at six months, at nine months, and then maybe after a certain period of time, we can really evaluate.

Perry Maughmer

Yes, it was a good idea before we have another good idea. Let's just stop it with the with the string of great ideas and the constant changing in direction. Until we understand what the implications of our ideas are from a managerial standpoint. Again, Did it increase the bottom line? Did it increase revenue? Decrease cost. Did it do both? Did it do one or the other? Did it do neither? Is it actually a horrible idea? Now that we have the data back, it proves that it's not a good idea. Okay, let's stop doing it. But that's what it takes to manage an organization. And that's what makes that's what delivers value. We can't lose sight of that. We need to focus on that in organization. We need to focus on how do we how do we create environments and an ecosystem to provide people the tools and the understanding and the reps. To do the work. That's the other thing. Managers. And if I'm if I'm trying to help people become better managers, I can get them reps at what they're doing. Leadership's a lot harder to get reps at because it's situational. It's qualitative. I may not have the opportunity to do that, you know, ten, 15, 20 times a week. I can get people reps at managerial tasks, which is the only way we get better at something. I don't care what it is.

Perry Maughmer

You have to have a rep. You have to have an at bat. You have to have the opportunity to do it over and over and over again to develop the both the mental and the physical ability to do it. Muscle memory in a metaphorical sense. If I if I have somebody managing a PNL, I can do that every month. I know that's coming. I want to reforecast. I want you to do I want you to do that every month. I want you to do these things every month. And then over a period of time, you know, if they're getting better or not. Now, all the while we can develop great leaders, too. We can we can develop leadership and managerial excellence at the same time as we should. Again, this isn't an either or discussion. I just want to make sure both things are in the discussion. And it is my opinion that if we get really, really focused and good at, creating environments where people can become better managers, it gives us runway to work on leadership. Instead of trying to work on leadership thinking it's going to improve our business results. Because if we focus on leadership solely and we don't talk about management at all, we're missing the boat. Because as I started this off with leadership is overrated. It's sexy, it's fun, it's charismatic, it's all these things.

Perry Maughmer

But it doesn't always drive value in organizations. What drives value is excellent management. And now I'm going to put my soap box away. Momentarily it'll be back. But this one? I'm good now. I've said all I need to say, which is about as long as any podcast has to be, I got to get in and say what I got to say and stop talking when I've said it. And I have. So focus on management. Focus on becoming a great business slash organizational manager, figure out what those skill sets are that you need to really manage. And one of those, the foundation is financial management. How do you run your business? What are the metrics? And then think about how do I how do I set up systems and processes where other people can do their job? Because again, everything I want to do is sustainable and scalable. That's what managers think. Like is it sustainable and scalable? If you do that, you have the runway to develop your leadership skills. You'll figure it out. I got faith in you. I got faith in each and every one of you. In the meantime, take care of yourself. Take care of those you care about and even take care of those you don't care about. If we all did that, it'd be a better world. And that's what we're here to do. I'll see you next time in the lab.