The CIO’s fatal flaw: Too much leadership, not enough management

One source of this disrespect is a popular myth of organizational effectiveness consulting — that organizations are permeated with lots and lots of activities that shouldn’t be improved because they aren’t worth doing. We consultants are well-armed with pithy anecdotes about past clients within which we unearthed a costly example of something-or-other that wasn’t worth doing.

But as the saying goes, anecdote isn’t the singular of data, and too often it turns out that the something-that-isn’t-worth-doing is something the management consultant doesn’t understand well enough to decipher its value.

Management is how those in charge make sure the organization really is running the way it should. That being the case, why is it that leadership gets all the mystique?

It starts, I think, with a fundamental misunderstanding. Getting back to Drucker, it’s easy to draw a false inference — that if leadership is doing the right things while management is doing them right, then without leaders to guide them, managers would do the wrong things the right way, steadfastly dragging the whole enterprise in the wrong direction.

But it would be an unusual organization whose managerial leaders, lacking any good sense, really have no idea what the right direction is. And anyway, it would be exceptionally rare for there to be just one right direction and not a number of promising alternatives.

How strategy fits in

Strategy, then, more often than not, isn’t something leaders craft, but something they choose from among several alternatives, leaving the hard work of making the strategy real to the managers who report to them.