Managing Leadership^®

Our relationship with work is peculiar and complicated. We work to maintain ourselves, of course, but that maintenance is at least as important psychically as it is physically. Unfortunately, much of the advice offered by management – and, it must be said, especially “leadership” – gurus over recent decades has distorted the psychic element, turning it back in on itself.

It is possible, for example, to read much of this material and conclude that we are to take our sense of self-worth from what our experience at work gives us, rather than from what we give to our work. And, as we have often noted here, a disturbing amount of this advice is about what we should be in order to attract this positive feedback, rather than what we should do in order to contribute and to take reward – quiet and deep – from that.

But are we not to be permitted ambitions beyond that? Unacknowledged altruism is probably no more sustainable a basis for our relationships with our work than it is for our interactions with each other in the broader economy.

So what sort of approach should we take to our expectations for and from ourselves at work? Is it inevitably self-defeating, on one or more of several levels, to bring personal ambition to the office? Or can we find a way to integrate the needs we have of our work with those it has of us? Should we build our careers around such personal ambitions (however archly characterized by the gurus), or simply harness our sense of ourselves to the greater collective enterprise?

Next week, amid a couple of book reviews, we will try to take an inventory of what we might, or ought to, want from work – how we want to feel about ourselves and our value in our own and others’ eyes, and how to reconcile this with the self-destruction that can be caused by following some of the blind alleys promoted along these lines.

We will consider the question of how to find fulfillment in management. We will then, perhaps, spend some time examining how truly to earn it. Please do join in.

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This post is a part of a series. You can learn about and link to the other articles here: Managing life, work, and life at work

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Today’s tips: At the heart of our upcoming discussion is the question of integrity. What does that mean to you? However you define it, how do you think you personally measure up? Please see this excellent report on research in this topic, by Brian Amble of Management-Issues.

And speaking of inwardly-focused management advice, please also see this list of “personal core-competencies for the 21st century” from a Harvard professor, as described by Sean Silverthorne of BNET. Take a look at these and ask yourself if this is just another form of subtly pushy repackaging of the same old ambiguous concepts, or if it makes any sense to you.

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Note: Managing Leadership has been selected as a top 100 leadership blog by The Daily Reviewer. Many thanks to them for this! Please do take a look at their site – a very nicely organized presentation of terrific resources.

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