Lead management or Lead Direction

Lead management refers to how we manage with people. When we work with groups such as teachers and their classrooms, employers or managers and their employees, principals and teachers, parents and their children, we believe there is a more successful method to assisting everyone to achieve success.

There are fundamental differences between what boss managers and lead managers believe. Boss managers believe that motivation comes from others, and without a rigid hierarchy and plenty of control, people cannot be expected to behave well. They believe that, left to their own devices, employees or students will slack off and not do what’s expected of them, and that it’s the boss’s job to motivate (coerce, manipulate, control) them to perform well.

Lead managers believe that, given opportunity, responsibility and support, most people will strive to produce quality work because doing so feels good. They believe that motivation is intrinsic and control is counter-productive, so they strive to create a work or learning environment that capitalizes on the employees’ or students’ own motivation and willingness to excel.

As an example, in today’s educational system, teachers are taught to teach, but they aren’t taught to manage. As a result, they resort to boss management strategies – coercion, threats, punishment, rewarding to control – and set up a competitive rather than a co-operative environment. Since they believe that students won’t learn unless they’re forced to learn, they mismanage accordingly, and schools have become places of indifference, hostility and resentment rather than halls of learning that exhibit joy and co-operation.

A lead manager, on the other hand, knows he can’t make anybody do anything they don’t want to do, and that he’ll never get his employees on side if he can’t convince them to buy into his ideas. As a result, his management style is more co-operative and respectful.