Every once in awhile, a number of articles or blog posts converge nicely to build on each other.  Today over at Wally Bock’s Three Star Leadership Blog in his post entitled Sunday Afternoons, Wally offers his perspective on an article describing that many people report feeling a high degree of anxiety about work as Monday looms in the foreground.  Wally’s guidance for the leader’s role in helping eradicate the causes of this unproductive stress is priceless and timeless (go ahead and click over and read it) and it puts the exclamation point on the leadership themes found in several other recent articles and posts.

Writing in an article entitled, "The Best Advice I Ever Got" in the March, 2008 Harvard Business Review, Kris Gopalakrishnan, Cofounder and CEO of Infosys Technologies describes the impact on his leadership style of a college professor’s guidance to: concentrate on what he was good at, work hard and not worry.   Simple words  that resonated through a career and ultimately impacted thousands.

"At one level, my professor’s meaning was simple: Do what you love, work hard at it and all will go well.  But the specifics of his message and the way he delivered it, go to the heart of every leader’s toughest challenge-motivating people."

Kris describes how he focuses on three important things in leading: (note from Art: the quotes below are all Kris’s, but the supporting text is abridged):

"I use his actions and his words as model for spurring people on to superior performance. First, I constantly seek ways to get my love for this business across.  Second, in talking with employees, I seldom focus on numbers but instead on big ideas and their role.  Finally, I get people to focus on the future impact of how they manage the task at hand.  Today, Infosys is a $3.1 billion public company with over 80,000 employees.  But my job remain the same as in 1981: to motivate one individual at a time."

Juxtapose Kris’s "motivate one individual at a time" theme with Wally’s formula for curing the Sunday-stress and you’ve got a powerful description of the true role of a leader: "If you want to head off the "chronic sadness of late Sunday
afternoon," the best way to do that is to give people a great working
environment to go to on Monday morning. And the key to that is great
supervisors. Select them. Train them. Support them."

Given the context of these two valuable perspectives on the role of a leader, I have to jump back to the a previous post I wrote regarding a Wall Street Journal article that has consultants offering a cost-saving opportunity by suggesting that increasing a typical manager’s span of control may be the way to go. After sleeping on and thinking about this post (Improve Managerial Effectiveness by Broadening Span of Control?), I am even more disturbed at how out of touch this consulting guidance is with the realities of what a leader is and what he/she should be doing in their daily lives.  This is reckless advice.

One of the biggest problems I find in many organizations is how out of touch the leadership is with what they are supposed to do to lead.  The identification, development and retention of leaders at all levels of the organization is frequently not visible on the strategic priority radar screen.  Leaders often don’t understand their role in creating the effective working environment (reference Practical Lessons in Leadership for a detailed treatment of the topic), and leaders don’t take responsibility for conducting the "Management Discussions" so critical to individual development.  Even worse, the individual leaders in the middle layer are often the least equipped and the most strained of all.  Suggesting that broadening the span of control for these individuals will improve a firm’s performance is, well, reckless.

The bottom-line:

Kris and Wally have it right.  The leader must focus on motivating one individual at a time and on creating the environment that has people excited about showing up for work on Monday morning.  While we might prefer showing up at the beach once in awhile, our time here on this tiny blue dot is short and it is our lot to do something constructive, creative and contributory.  As a leader, it’s time to take advantage of the rare opportunity that you have to positively impact others around you.  This will make your journey all the more enjoyable, and odds are that the benefit to the business of your creating the right environment and focusing on your true role will exceed the benefits from slashing management staff needlessly to hit a ratio.  Leadership is a profession, practice it carefully and responsibly.