The best managers lead their people from behind, while the best leaders also manage the work.

The best of both do it because that’s who they are, not with expectations of personal fame.

You are onto the big secret. Not just character, but also caring are critical to successful management AND leadership.

There is a universally-applicable model for how people view and assess opportunities and events. In my research for “The Alpha Factor,” I discovered what I call the decision pyramid. The simple conclusion is that people are attracted to things and opportunities that make them feel good about themselves and about how they believe others see them. (www.thealphsfactor.com)

As a manager, you get far more out of nurturing those needs than through more “traditional” management strategies.

Bravo to you for recognizing that.

I would love to do a guest post on the subject of generating short-term gains while improving long-term success. I have lots of examples of how the revenue side can be managed almost as easily as the cost-side can by understanding the buying decision pyramid.

Just let me know, and we’ll coordinate something.

I still remember how Frederick Reichheld in “Loyalty Rules!” (2001) proved that a 5% improvement in employee retention translated to a 25%-100% gain in earnings and in doing so legitimized corporate culture as a real and valuable thing. Hopefully, your book will do the same for thinking long-term.

Sorry for the typo on your name. I was typing too fast!

You raise some great questions here, especially about the short-range view issue. The trouble is that in most larger companies, especially publicly-held ones, this is exactly the cause of much of the turmoil we see.

In fact, the higher you go in the executive ranks, the more short-viewed most managers are forced to become. The stock market has driven many top execs in publicly-held corporations to focus heavily upon short-term results with little regard to long-term consequences of their tactical decisions. It’s not hard to generate short-term profit numbers, if you are willing to sacrifice your long-term success. With the incentives being paid to CEOs even of losing companies for hitting target stock prices, who can blame them for being short-viewed?

In my new book, “The Alpha Factor” (Westlyn Publishing, 2008), I describe a new model for managing the revenue side of a business that proved itself capable of creating dramatic, sustainable growth in dozens of companies without sacrificing long-term success. The results of my tests with more than 75 companies was overwhelming in proof that almost any company can create both short-term and long-term profit growth without resorting to the short-view tactics being employeed by so many corporate “managers.”

Surprisingly, in my reseasrch I saw far too many companies where the top “leadership” was undermining the strategic initiatives of lower-level staff who had direct product or line responsibility for creating success. I talk a lot more about this issue and some of the answers on my website: http://www.thealphafactor.com

Thanks for bringing this very timely issue to light again.

More importantly, you hit the nail on the head in terms of what’s needed, not only for the Millennials, but for all workers.

The world has changed, now we just need to convince all those folks who insist on keeping ‘manager’ and ‘leader’ separate.