One thing that I'm grateful about my work is that I get to sit in on meetings where executives debate future directions of the hospital. These are people, many of them doctors and surgeons, who have had a lifetime of experience in patient care and organizational leadership, who are endlessly energetic and impossibly organized thinkers. This is the kind of conversation I thrive on, the kind about vision and change that makes the numbing data analysis somehow worthwhile.
Listening to our charismatic (if a bit irratic) CMIO try to convince others in the room of his vision for information security, my mind began to drift away from the conversation itself. Instead, I thought about what I've observed about his role as a leader. Other than his title, what makes his word so influential? How did he come to that title anyway? Did he come to influence by the wealth of his experience or the boldness and succesful outcome of his ideas? What is his primary function as a leader -- is it a manager of change, utilizer of people and skills, or a grand visionary?
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Curiously enough, I was at a panel last week on leadership given by an ex-Marine and some financial type. One point the money man made was that in his experience leaders and managers tend to be different roles, if not necessarily different people.
ReplyDeleteThe manager is more conservative; he is trying to maintain and govern a system. He is mostly working in the realm of the known. The leader however is the visionary; he is looking for the new ground to break and so has to be comfortable with more risk in that he is not sure how things will end up. Mister marine boiled it down to saying that the leader finds out the process, and the manager optimizes it. Interesting.
But what I've found puzzling is that in many organizations, especially larger, more traditional ones, in order to achieve a position in which people will listen to your vision, you often have to prove your competence as a manager of process. Maybe that's why they call it corporate America.
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