Episode #425: Leaders Sensing Versus Managers Knowing

Marcel Danne, an Executive Coach whom I have never met or talked to, recently put up an idea on social media about how managers have a different perspective to leaders. He contrasted how a manager’s priority is “know, feel and sense” while the leaders priority is “sense, feel and know”. This is esoteric stuff at first blush, but it is a useful insight. I was thinking about myself when I was a manager.

For some inexplicable reason I thought I knew what to do. I was fully confident in my own ability and my feeling was that I had the answers and the clarity to know what we should be doing. I had the get up and go to execute on my plan, keeping my head down and relentlessly bulldozering forward. The effort was centralised in me as the person accountable for the results. If I want your opinion, “then I will give it to you”, type of thing. I wonder if other leaders can recognise themselves anywhere here?

Why are we so confident about our ideas and opinions and so uninterested in what anyone else thinks? The way forward seems crystal clear. Part of the reason may be the limited perspective of the manager. I thought I had all the answers because I diligently self-educated after varsity, read voraciously, consumed information, put in the hours, worked extremely hard and pushed myself over the edge. The latter proved to be a very expensive life-learning on multiple dimensions, but that is another article.

There is also the ego driving the self-belief, but often devoid of any great self-awareness. Somehow when we are managers, the world seems straightforward and we push the limits to try and move quickly up the ranks. What we need to be doing seems plainly obvious and there is no second guessing, because we are in action not in reflection.

Japan is interesting in that here “the first priority is not having the correct answers”. Now that statement sounded quite weird to manager me. I thought the correct answer had to be the top priority, otherwise what on earth are we managers supposed to be doing? The other part of that Japanese line of thinking is, “Having the right questions is the main priority”. Hearing that other shoe drop stops you in your tracks. On reflection, I don’t recall spending any manager time on defining the correct questions, but a lot of time pursuing the execution of the right answers.

The “sense” part of my toolbox was limited. The crash through or crash philosophy doesn’t care too much about the delicate feelings of the rest of the crew on the good ship “Manager”. It was a lot of “my way baby or the highway”, “we brook no fools here”, “zero time for excuses”, “get out of the kitchen if you can't take the heat”, “lunch is for losers”. All intense stuff, because I was intense, outcome driven, get to the top, brutal with myself and so not so open to considering “feelings”.

Eventually I started to reorder the line-up to have feelings more up the front. A bell didn’t ring, so that I knew a change had occurred. It was gradual and probably had a lot to do with following and teaching of the human relations philosophies of Dale Carnegie. I know this is a trope in the USA, where shamed and ejected public officials discover Jesus and they make a comeback claiming they are “reborn”. In my case I hadn’t thought about it, until a secretary who had worked for me in my “intense” time, came back to work for me at Dale Carnegie Training. She didn’t say anything to me directly, but I heard through the grapevine that she was astounded at how much I had changed since she had taken time out of the workforce to have children and how much I had improved as a leader. It was a survey of one, but I understood what she meant.

I am still very competitive. However, I can also see that I can’t do it all by myself. I need people with me because business and technology are too complex today to keep mimicking the John Wayne, Hollywood style of rugged individualism. I am certainly more sensitive to peoples’ feelings than before, although I don’t see me winning too many gold medal prizes for my abilities just yet. Let’s just say, I am improving and still have some way to go.

How about you? Where are you on this line-up of senses, feelings and knowing? I found Marcel’s construct was a fresh way of examining myself and reflecting on what has been accomplished and where there still needs more work. I would like to say I am the poster boy for the revolution, but that isn’t quite the case as yet. Leadership is certainly a journey of self-discovery. That thought just never bubbled up when I was a manager, so I guess there is some progress and some hope for me yet. How about you?