I never could keep straight the difference between psychology and psychiatry until my wife became a clinical psychologist. Now, not only is it very important for me to know, it’s actually quite interesting.

For one thing, strictly speaking, a psychiatrist is essentially a physician who specializes in mental disease. And – again, strictly speaking – that is how they are taught to view mental disorders: as medical disorders. They are fundamentally biochemical in nature, and treatment consists, quite naturally, of restoring a healthy biochemical state in the patient. That is, treatment consists, as it does most of the time for most other medical doctors, of medication.

Psychologists acknowledge that many mental disorders have their origin in biochemical imbalance. On the other hand, they believe that many others arise from dysfunction in personality, behavior, and the like.

Insofar as this is the case, restoring biochemical balance is sort of like pushing on a string – it fails to address the core problem, or the core cause of it. Thus, it can only, with constant modification, suppress the disorder’s symptoms, but never cure it.

Moreover, many psychologists argue, even when a mental disorder can be traced to a biochemical source, biochemical therapy may not be the most effective way to treat it. Psychological therapy may turn out to be the best way to help the patient better monitor and control his or her own body and mental state together.

So, even where there is agreement on the core nature of certain specific problems being biochemical, the question still gets down to what is the cause of the imbalance. After all, it doesn’t just happen of its own accord – what makes it become dysfunctional in a person?

Think of a manual transmission car. If it is going along smoothly at a target rate of 30 mph in third gear on a level road, psychiatrists and psychologists alike might be satisfied. But if it stays in third gear while entering a steep upgrade, it will start to slow down and stall. What happened?

A psychiatrist would argue that there is an imbalance between the load being put on the engine and the power it is generating. The solution is, given the desired speed and new environmental conditions, to downshift to second gear, and that would be the prescription.

Of course, once the road leveled out again, the engine would begin revving at a very high rate in order to maintain the target speed, leading to a number of different but equally discomfiting problems. Now what?

Well a psychiatrist would once again determine that there is a mismatch between the load on the engine and the power it is generating. The prescription would be to shift back into third gear.

And so on.

On the face of it, the psychiatrist is right. Every time. But problems of one sort or another, seemingly quite different, keep recurring in one form or another.

And so the psychologist steps in to argue that the problem isn’t in the mechanical state of the car, but in the mental state of the driver, who needs to be taught how to safely and economically operate this sort of car in various traffic and environmental conditions. Once that is done, the problem will not recur.

Who is right? As a manager, what does this mean to you? Do you concern yourself with pistons, gears, and atoms, organizing them just so in order to maintain the desired state, or do you address yourself to motivations and states of mind, attempting to get them to work on their own in harmony with your organizational goals?

We’ll continue to look at this in the next several days. Thanks for stopping by!

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Today’s tips: Extraordinary visionary leaders – just watch out. See this piece from Reuters about one man once effusively praised. What happened? Did he change? Was everyone wrong about him the whole time? Or is the concept a poisonous corruption of professional management?

Please see this article by Mary Jo Asmus offering a distillation of her thoughts on individual leadership – please pay special attention to the first two paragraphs (after the italicized intro). Consider the second, in the context of the first. There is much to think about, there.

You will also want to note the points made about the latent middleman in all of us, by Fred H. Schlegel. Don’t miss this one.

If you have anything to do with project management, please do also stop by this interesting new site, an interactive forum for project managers to exchange ideas, challenges, and solutions.

Technorati Tags: psychology, psychiatry, clinical psychologist, psychiatrist, physician, psychologist, manager, motivation, organizational goals, visionary, leader, Mary Jo Asmus, individual leadership, Fred H. Schlegel, project management, project, manager

Excellent stories have been stacking up, with no logical place or time to link to them. So, we’re going to do a roundup today as a venue for offering these truly worthwhile resources.

Dopes. In his classic “Up the Organization,” which every manager should read, Robert Townsend touched on the then relatively new issue of gender equality in the workplace. His conclusion, perhaps only partly an artifact of the times, was that there was really no contest: it is simply too easy for women to turn men into gibbering idiots. Now comes evidence, as if we needed it, to support this view: please this brief summary of the research from neatorama.

Diversity. Please see The Economist for this interesting array of who would’ve thought stories:

• Did you need any further proof that so-called traditional university education is on the way out? See this about how the gamers may have a lot more right than we ever would have expected.
• Things are always more complicated than those who hope to close the door on discussion would like to have it. See this about how genes are not always the architects of our fates, but rather just as likely the victims of our actions.
• This is a fascinating piece about how to make bridges last just long enough to continue offering their primary function when it is needed most, after a major disaster such as an earthquake. The thinking involved in this hard-worked innovation is terrific in and of itself – but consider also the freedom enjoyed by the researcher to explore this unlikely avenue of inquiry. You will also want to see this one about self-monitoring bridges.
• And here’s another example of that terrifically dynamic and delightfully unconstrained spirit of curiosity – whether competitive or otherwise: it’s about your tires. And you thought your brakes were smart.

Dedication. An at once devastating commentary on contemporary culture and a really inspiring account of a truly world-class hero, by Gregg Easterbrook at the WSJ.

Deliberation. Surely a valuable characteristic, but perhaps not quite as exclusive as we thought. Please see the WSJ again about the social behavior of – bacteria.

Decisiveness. We place a lot of faith in this characteristic, and look for the right individual traits or collaborative circumstances for assuring that it is well placed. It turns out, though, that we should give things more time for deliberation and reflection, rather than relying on specific tricks and gimmicks. Please see the always enjoyable yet studious PsyBlog for why groups can drive individuals to extreme positions, and warp our decision-making. Next, visit the site again for another manager’s must-read about our internal confusion between understanding and acceptance.

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Today’s tip: Speaking of delightful diversity, please see this list of modest proposals by Michael Wade. My absolute favorite is number seven. Yours?

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Technorati Tags: resource, Robert Townsend, equality, workplace, neatorama, Economist, university, education, innovation, freedom, curiosity, culture, Gregg Easterbrook, WSJ, characteristic, trait, deliberation, reflection, PsyBlog, manager, understanding, Michael Wade

One of the problems with the word “leadership” is that it is pretty slippery. You can define it to mean whatever you wish to emphasize, under whatever circumstances you face, at any given moment.

So, let’s just consider the two basic categories into which definitions of leadership, or its presumed components, tend to fall. One is loosely related to matters of insight – vision, method, innovation, creativity, and the like.

As obvious as it may appear to many that all of these are expressions of leadership, the matter is far from clear. Nevertheless, that argument can be made, and these do have the effect of helping to clarify purpose and action, and of lining up organizational energy behind those.

But the thing about these is that it can also be argued that they are best identified or cultivated (depending on which we are talking about) from within the organization, rather than drawn exclusively from its top leadership. This offers a broader, more informed, and typically more open-minded and fertile field for such examples of insight to surface from, than is reliably provided by a select group of specially cultivated individual leaders.

The other group of presumed leadership definitions might be contained under a category called “command.” These are the functions that provide discipline. Force of character, strategic guidance, operational policy, the power of personal example, and so on. It is instructive to note that this category necessarily also includes the full range of communication skills. And, moreover, they are all classic functions of management.

This group is an example of the problem about discussions of this type that we have referred to – the tendency to define as leadership whatever happens to suit the speaker’s purpose. But it points to another one, as well: we habitually award a positive value to whatever we define as leadership. But it most certainly does not inevitably warrant that.

And all of this, in turn, suggests two reasons why we need to maintain leadership in a position subordinate to management. One is that the former is a characteristic, a function, a process – suit yourself; but it is not a discipline; the latter is that. Moreover, those elements of it that are most clearly actual examples of leadership are best sought where they are most likely to be found: within the organization, not atop it.

The other is that whatever we settle on leadership as being, and wherever we choose to insist it is located, it is not inevitably constructive, much less disciplined to the goals and purpose of the organization. It is management’s role to ensure that it is those things.

And this is why the position taken here that ownership of the decision-making process cannot be given to employees, but must remain with managers, to whom it is contractually assigned, is not inconsistent with the principles of “managing leadership” promoted in these pages. Leadership – like decision-making and other forms of delegated authority – can and often ought to occur throughout the organization, but it must be managed in order to ensure that it constructively serves designated organizational aims.

Thanks for staying with us through the development of this argument. Please be sure to offer your thinking about it, as well. And in the meanwhile, have a great weekend!

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Today’s tips: Speaking of flexibility thriving from a firm foundation, please see Miki Saxon on how to develop a healthy culture without dissolving into formlessness or descending into bureaucracy.

And, or course, despite today’s argument, many of you will insist on retaining your leadership – rather than management – development programs. That’s fine. But at least be sure to follow Dan McCarthy‘s timely advice on how to design and fund it.

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Why not try out this feature provided here by Answers.com: If you double-click on any (non-hypertext-linked) word on the main page of the site, a window will open providing definitions or encyclopedic material about that term, together with links to additional sources of information. Try it out – it’s interesting and fun.

And, of course, while you’re clicking around, don’t forget to click on your choice of an email or RSS-feed subscription to these pages – we’ll be proud to have you join us!

Technorati Tags: leadership, insight, vision, innovation, creativity, purpose, action, energy, organization, leader, command, discipline, communication, management, ownership, decision-making, employee, manager, managing leadership, authority, flexibility, Miki Saxon, culture, bureaucracy, Dan McCarthy

We have seen that a manager cannot delegate responsibility, but can delegate authority without losing any of it – and without losing any control, into the bargain. So, how does this relate to the commonly made suggestion that employees should be given “ownership” of decisions?

To begin with, it points to something that is key to a proper understanding of delegating: you assign tasks – you do not abrogate them. That is, when you delegate a task, you have not given it away. It remains yours because the responsibility for it remains yours.

Decisions are also like that. You can give away the authority to make them. But you cannot give away the responsibility for making them – and certainly not ownership of them, either.

So, by all means, let employees make all of the decisions you want. Just remember that you are still responsible. Like authority, the decisions you delegate retain their origin in you.

It is well to remain aware of the limits beyond which we, as managers, cannot express our fashionable notions of enlightened management. We are not owners. Our obligations outweigh our latitude for experimentation in this regard.

On the other hand, it is just as well to be fully aware of the context within which we, in fact, can employ intelligent and thoughtful methods of modern management. If we practice the delegation of authority and decision-making from a firm appreciation of a solid foundation in retained responsibility, all parties concerned – owners, managers, and employees – will be far the better for it.

The doing of that is an altogether different – and, of course, a very large – subject. We will close the current one out, tomorrow. See you then!

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Today’s tip: Group decision-making – and groupthink – are hardly new phenomena. And neither of them are restricted to humans, either. Please see this fascinating piece from The Economist for more on this.

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Technorati Tags: manager, employee, ownership, decision, task, responsibility, authority, management, owner, decision-making, groupthink, Economist

Your greatest problem as a manager is not the weight of responsibility you bear. That is, of course, a very real burden. But the reason it is not your biggest concern is precisely that there is nothing you can do about it.

Except make it easier to discharge. You do that by frankly addressing the issue that is, in fact, a manager’s greatest problem: time. Unlike responsibility, you can’t be given more time in a day than is already there. But you can leverage it. And you do that by delegating authority.

When owners give you responsibility, it is all yours, all the time. It is indivisible and fixed in place – you can’t pass it along.

When they give you authority, though, you can. Moreover, you do that without losing it, yourself.

After all, authority derives its force from its source. Your own authority is given you, ultimately, by owners. When you use it, everyone knows where it came from, and there is no question about its validity.

The same applies when you delegate it. Its authenticity, when it is used by the juniors to whom you have given it, is defined and understood in terms of its origin in you, representing as you do the legitimate source from which it emanates.

And that source is inextinguishable. You reduce it not one bit by allocating it intelligently. You can award large measures of it to competent staff members for application to important projects. Or, you can assign carefully calibrated amounts to others to measure and develop their abilities.

You can even give employees the authority to make decisions. But that authority only traces its ancestry back to ownership – it doesn’t displace it.

We will look at what that means for delegating decisions, tomorrow. Please do stop in.

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Today’s tip: Speaking of ownership, Carl Icahn is a great supporter of the idea that boards of public companies should do a better job of representing their interests, and that owners should be given more means for ensuring that they do. Please see what he has to say about Jack Welch‘s (who, while at GE, combined the CEO and Chairman positions in his own person) defense of boards, and about a potential remedy for shareholders.

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Technorati Tags: manager, responsibility, authority, owner, delegate, staff, project, employee, decision, ownership, Carl Icahn, Jack Welch, GE, CEO, Chairman, shareholder

Many managers are concerned at the prospect of delegating authority to their staffs because they think it amounts to yielding control. Actually, though, you yield neither. We’ll talk about what that means with respect to authority, tomorrow. Today, let’s take a look at control.

To begin with, it is worthwhile to bear in mind that there are two ways for a manager to view this function. You can control the doing of the work itself, or you can control the means by which it is done.

The former is ordinarily what a worker does. When a manager does it, it is commonly characterized negatively as micro-management. This is not as automatically a sin as it is often depicted. Nevertheless, the real “work” of a manager can arguably be described as controlling the means by which the work is done, rather than by doing the work, itself.

The distribution of authority is one of these means. And when you award it to a junior, you do not lose control of it.

You retain the ability to supervise that authority. You allocate it like any other resource, oversee its use, assess its contribution to the task, and then make further decisions regarding its employment. If it is well used, you continue or reinforce it. If not, you rescind or reassign it.

The delegation of authority, then, doesn’t reduce your control. Rather, intelligently monitored and allocated, it increases it, and expands its reach.

What’s more, it does the same for your authority, as well. We’ll look at that tomorrow. See you then!

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Today’s tips: Please take a moment to view this short but enlightening piece, from The Economist, about why the healthier the company the more likely it is to have its debt called in by its bankers, leaving the weaker companies as the last ones standing.

And if that leaves you disoriented, then you may need to get recombobulated. Please be sure to see this piece by Frank Roche about where, exactly, you can do that.

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Technorati Tags: authority, control, manager, worker, micro-management, supervise, resource, task, decision, employment, delegation, Economist, company, Frank Roche

A common problem at work, remarked upon with strained humor, is that we are given responsibility for our assigned tasks without the necessary authority to make them happen. As we have seen, the idea that responsibility can be given away is a misrepresentation of what actually occurs.

But while the distinction should make a difference to the manager, it makes no practical one to the person who is “delegated” this problem. And so, it points to an interesting irony.

Managers have a tendency to delegate what they must keep, and to retain what they ought to delegate. This is a perfectly understandable, human instinct; that’s why we see so much of it, and why we hear this complaint so often.

It addresses the correct issue: as natural as the instinct is, it is not productive behavior for a manager to, essentially, evade responsibility while retaining an iron grip on authority. Rather, it is counter-productive. It inhibits effective progress on tasks, lowers morale, weakens collaboration, and creates an unhealthy “look out for Number One” culture.

On top of all that, it teaches up-and-coming managers to propagate the behavior. This is inevitable, because the fact that it is so prevalent in others means that it has to be exhibited by all, just as a basic survival technique.

Not so funny, after all, is it?

So, how do you deal with this? As a manager, how do you resolve the intellectual and emotional dissonance generated by the apparently counter-intuitive need to retain responsibility at the same time that you relinquish authority?

We’ll take a look at that question tomorrow. Please be sure to join us!

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Today’s tip: Speaking of intellectual and emotional dissonance, how about the quandary presented by the need to get a new office chair. Please see this hilarious post on five essential upgrades for this surprisingly important item, by G.L. Hoffman (Thanks to Molly DiBianca, of The Delaware Employment Law Blog, for the tip).

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Technorati Tags: work, responsibility, task, authority, manager, delegate, productive, behavior, progress, morale, collaboration, culture, G.L. Hoffman, Molly DiBianca

The responsibility for administering a business originates, unsurprisingly, in owners. They are the only group naturally possessed of the requirement to make decisions regarding the direction and management of the organization. They can delegate their authority to other groups, but not their responsibility.

Except in circumstances wherein they become one or another sort of silent, or absentee, owner. While many partnership arrangements provide examples of this, the classic is the shareholder-owned corporation.

In this case fundamental administrative responsibility is placed in a board of directors. The board then hires a manager or management team to, typically, take on the greater part of this burden.

The purpose of this perfectly legal sleight of hand is to facilitate productive investment and entrepreneurial activity. But in the context of the current discussion, it is important to keep track of what has happened, here: responsibility that ordinarily cannot be delegated by owners has been structurally removed from them and placed into the hands of one group, which retains a directive role and then contracts out – not delegates – responsibility for management, to another group.

Thus, administrative responsibility has been transplanted into a group where it does not naturally arise. The strength and integrity of the chain of responsibility have been diluted quite a bit by this process, and it is not unexpected that some may under-appreciate the significance of this fact.

Here is that significance: just because responsibility has been removed two degrees from its normal source – from owners through directors to managers – we are not to conclude that it can be further extended, divided, or assigned. It is not a resource belonging to managers which they can allocate. It is a fiduciary duty they have shouldered which they cannot share.

So, however deeply in thrall you may be to the most genuinely inspiring and seemingly enlightened modern management theories, you cannot give away your responsibility to run the company. It is yours, and whether you do it personally or not, you must retain – you will be held – responsible for it.

You own the management-level decisions made in your company. You cannot give ownership of them to employees.

But you can do something else. We’ll talk about that next – see you tomorrow!

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Today’s tip: Wally Bock recently assembled one of the most thought-provoking selections of quotes on strategy that you are likely to find in one place. It is definitely worth a visit, some time, and careful deliberation, so please do stop over – you will enjoy and profit from it.

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Want to read articles from the Encyclopedia Britannica for free? Take a moment to scroll down the sidebar on the main site a bit: right below my current readings you will see a dynamically renewing box pointing to articles on capitalism from the Britannica. These are typically available only by paid subscription, but if you click through to an article from here, you will be able to read it for free. Try it!

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Technorati Tags: responsibility, business, owner, decision, direction, management, organization, delegate, authority, partnership, shareholder, corporation, board of directors, manager, investment, integrity, resource, fiduciary duty, company, ownership, employee, Wally Bock, strategy

Responsibility is a surprisingly slippery subject in the world of modern organizations. We talk about it easily and with assurance. But it turns out that we can often find ourselves talking past each other about quite different uses of the term.

Let’s take a quick look at one way this works. Let’s say you own your business as a sole proprietor. In this case the nature of your responsibility is clear: it is complete. You may delegate some matters to certain individuals, but you remain responsible.

Sure, you can hold them personally responsible, for their assigned tasks, to you. But if there is a problem – a product doesn’t meet contracted specifications, an employee is injured performing assigned duties as prescribed, a process causes harm in the community where your facility is located – people are going to come to you for restitution.

You cannot claim that the matter is out of your hands because you had made someone else responsible; you will find that you have not. Nor, when you hold your delegatees responsible, will you accept the excuse that they really aren’t, having further delegated the matter to their own juniors.

So, the subject would seem pretty clear: you cannot delegate your own responsibility. Saying you have done so is really only to use a rather misleading figure of speech; all you have actually done is establish a specific relationship of personal accountability between you and your delegatee. This does not dilute in any meaningful way the responsibility that was, and remains, yours.

But the subject, in the modern economy, is really not that clear. In order to encourage and facilitate wealth-creating investment and entrepreneurship, various legal business structures have been created to limit individual exposure to risk, shifting it, in various ways and degrees, to the enterprise itself. These legal devices progress from the various forms of partnership to the corporation.

Let’s now suppose, then, that you are an owner of one of these, a publicly-traded, anonymous shareholder corporation. In this case, you have no responsibility at all for the administration of the business, nor for the consequences of its acts. The fate of your investment depends on these, but that is the limit of your similarity with the sole proprietor.

What, then, happened to the rest the roles, in this regard, of the sole proprietor? In general, the corporation itself, as a “legal person,” is responsible for the consequences of its own acts. The board of directors is principally responsible for its administration.

Thus, responsibility is cut off from its natural source, ownership. It is then allocated, according to two of its applications, to two institutions created or modified specifically to receive them, neither of which, of course, are in the ownership group.

This creates some serious problems. As we have noted here before, perhaps the most fundamental of these are related to corporate governance (please see the series index and this subject’s category, in the sidebar, for more on this).

But it also produces a broader, and graver, environment of moral hazard. This, as the daily news amply demonstrates, can have a baleful influence on the integrity and expression of administrative responsibility, as well.

It is important to note this. However, for the purposes of our current discussion, we will look at the question of administrative responsibility alone. We will also fairy dust away any moral hazard concerns, so that we can focus more productively on our main topics of managing the decision making process – and leadership – in an organization.

We will turn to that tomorrow. See you then!

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Today’s tips: Speaking of moral hazard and problematic corporate governance practices, please see this piece, from The Economist, about the unfortunate effects of cross-shareholding in Japan.

In the last series, “Conceptualizing capitalism,” we suggested that one should be wary of the world-view of experts. Please see this otherwise interesting essay by one, Gary Marcus, in the WSJ. Pay particular attention from paragraph 14, beginning “All this matters,” to the end. Then ask yourself what he might mean, precisely, by the need to confront “evolution’s limits” head on.

On another subject altogether, please be sure to see what Cultural Offering has to say about where the art of reading aloud is still alive, and why that is important.

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Technorati Tags: organization, business, sole proprietor, responsibility, delegate, product, employee, process, community, facility, relationship, accountability, economy, investment, entrepreneurship, enterprise, partnership, corporation, shareholder, administration, legal person, board of directors, ownership, institution, corporate governance, moral hazard, influence, integrity, decision making, leadership, governance, Economist, cross-shareholding, Japan, expert, Gary Marcus, WSJ, Cultural Offering

One of the remarkable things about executives is how they define what is important. It generally turns out to be whatever they happen to be doing. That, in turn, usually is what they want to do.

They’ll often deny that, of course. Who would want to be swamped with a tide of demands that never wanes, to continuously be called upon to resolve this conflict, make that intractable decision, or pull some manager‘s fat out of the fire?

What they would rather be doing, they will tell you, is focusing on strategic issues, looking to the horizon, anticipating the future. That’s what they tell you they want to do.

We all say that, don’t we? But the fact is that what we really want to do is precisely what we are actually doing. On the one hand, the unending flow of activity gives us a comforting feeling of importance. We know that this will keep up as long as we continue to accept it, and we are secretly petrified that it will stop if we adopt pretensions to being selective about the matter. So we outwardly grumble about it – appearances must be kept up, after all – but inwardly we welcome, encourage it.

On the other hand, this wall of work produces a constant pressure that relieves us of one we fear more: the requirement to actually decide what we should be doing with our time, and to act on that decision. There is nothing but uncharted individual initiative out there, and inescapable accountability for how it is used. No, thanks!

So, we have the best of both worlds. We demonstrate noble aspirations to our true executive calling at the same time that we conspicuously “sacrifice” those ambitions to the unceasing demands made of us by the daily grind.

But the truth is, we can delegate almost everything before us. And here’s a deep dark secret that we shouldn’t kid ourselves about: we can simply toss most of the rest.

What about you? Are you making, and steeling yourself to act on, the hardest decision of all: how to use your time, what to direct your executive attention to?

Many make the point that we can take control of our work flow, or let it take control of us. But the fact is that we are always the captains of our own fate – and we can never blame fate for whatever that turns out to be.

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Today’s tip: In the context of the US automobile industry hitching a ride on the bailout bandwagon, what is the possible significance of the strikes repeatedly hitting Boeing, as reported in this item from BBC News? Who is at fault for the resultant delays in its next major aircraft – is management being shortsighted here, or labor – or both?

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Technorati Tags: executive, conflict, decision, manager, work, initiative, accountability, delegate, US, automobile, industry, bailout, Boeing, BBC News, management, labor