‘My difficulty with the phrase managing change may sound a bit academic to you,’ I began, ‘but let me share it with you anyway. Managing, as you probably know, comes from the Latin word manus, a hand. The main branch of derivation comes from the Italian word for handling war horses – the fine mastery we now call dressage. (Another contributing source is the French word for a household, hence the work of running one.) So controlling actual or potentially unruly things – horses, ships, swords, pens and (in Jane Austen’s novels) young children – is the main sense.’
‘We have added another thing to that list,’ said the young chief executive, ‘namely funds, finance, money. Stocks and shares can be pretty unruly! And material resources – like machines or power.’
‘And by extension it makes sense to talk about managing time too. For though time is invisible and mysterious, it is undoubtedly a precious resource, one that should be husbanded carefully. As the old English proverb says, An inch of time is worth a yard of gold.’
‘I can see what you are getting at. Change is not a thing, not a commodity, not a resource. So, strictly speaking, it can’t be managed.’
‘That is the case. For the same reason we cannot manage love or manage religion or manage happiness.’
‘Where does that leaves us?’
‘It is simple. We agree that all change is a journey, physical or metaphorical. It may be a welcome journey or an unwelcome one. It may start out with a known destination in mind, and turn out to be an adventure…’
‘Can you give me an example of what you mean?’ interrupted the young chief executive.
‘Take a well-known British company called Whitbread. When I worked for them as a consultant over 20 years ago they were one of the leading breweries. Beer was their only product and their “destination” was to increase market share. But the journey took an unexpected route. Whitbread stopped brewing beer years ago, and it has just sold its last 3,000 pubs to the private arm of Deutsche Bank for £1.6 billion. “Future” Whitbread will now consist of hotel, restaurant and leisure brands such as Beefeater, Pizza Hut and David Lloyd Leisure – at least until the next turn in the road.’
‘It sounds to me as if they are making the road up as they go along.’
‘Or reinventing themselves. One agent of change was strategic thinking. Here the key was to see their product and service in the context of the “bigger picture”. Whitbread, historically (since the 18th century) a brewer and owner of pubs, began to see itself in a more conceptual or abstract way as belonging to the leisure industry. Thinking generically like that led them to see their essential business as leisure, not brewing beers, and opened up a whole set of new choices.’
‘A new journey,’ he said. ‘But the top leadership still had to take their managers and workforce with them. With closures and redundancies it couldn’t have been easy.’
‘So managing change can only mean identifying new and positive directions, making a strategic plan, communicating truthfully and fully to all who must effect the changes – as well as be affected by them – and, above all, creating a positive and hopeful climate, one that makes people eager to embrace the challenging new opportunities ahead.’
‘But isn’t all this leadership?’
‘If you are right – and I believe you are – “managing change” was just a piece of business-school jargon, a bolt-on to the concept of management in the years before the importance of leadership came to be recognized. We manage things but people need to be led.’
‘Hold on,’ cried the young chief executive. ‘How about manmanagement or human resource management?’
‘We should dismiss the term “man-management” as belonging to a vanished era. Field Marshal Lord Slim told me that it was introduced into military jargon not long after the Indian Army produced a training manual entitled Mule Management! Sometimes I have heard wives talking about managing their husbands – presumably unruly ones – but the word used in relation to people usually carries, as here, overtones of manipulation.’
‘And managing human resources?’
‘Not a phrase that stirs my heart. It can imply that people are things – resources – on a par with money or machines. It has now replaced personnel, a word from the French military vocabulary used in contrast to materiel – the material weapons, equipment and logistic elements of an army. We don’t have a good name for what used to be called the personnel function, so “human resource management” survives for want of better. Perhaps later we can return to the phrase, however, as the inner meaning of “human resource” is worth exploring.’
The young chief executive mentioned that he was going to New York in a few days on business. While there he planned to attend a seminar on Transformational Leadership, a title that intrigued him. I said that I would look forward to sharing what he learned, and we concluded as usual by identifying some keypoints.
Keypoints
- Leadership exists on different levels. A team leader is in charge of the primary group. An operational leader is responsible for a significant part of the organization. A strategic leader leads the whole and is, in Ovid’s phrase ‘a leader of leaders’.
- In order to discharge their seven generic functions, strategic leaders need to develop ‘practical wisdom’, a blend of goodness, intelligence and experience.
- Being a manager is not the same as being a leader. But to say that someone is a good manager implies that they have some leadership within them, just as being a good leader implies administrative ability.
- Some situations call for managers and others for business leaders
- (using business in the widest sense of where people are busy). The critical factor is change. Change throws up the need for leaders; leaders bring about change.
- Only things can be managed – money, business, affairs, machines.
You cannot manage people – they can only be led.
We Awaken In Others The Same Attitude Of Mind We Hold Towards Them
Elbert Hubbard