Leadership is a Minimum Wage Job
I’ve been in a leadership position for over 35 years, and I can attest to its many challenges. Leadership roles are tough, they require knowledge, skill, business savvy and tact. But truthfully, leadership roles should be a minimum wage job if not for one aspect: change leadership.
If leaders were assigned the task of simply maintaining the status quo, then their organizational contribution would be somewhat worthless. Change is what makes the job challenging and worthy of higher salary.
Leaders are tasked with an unending stream of required change. These changes come in the form of software changes, staffing changes, training and development needs, material changes, product changes, scaling up, scaling down, capital improvements, new equipment, continuous improvement initiatives, policy changes, changes in business strategy, new customers, process changes, system changes, new targets and objectives and managing performance. This is what leadership is all about.
Anyone in a leadership role knows that there is no such thing as “just getting through the week unscathed”. Expectations are almost always to strive for better. There are unfortunately unfavorable changes too, but leaders are expected to lead through these situations as well. Examples of unfavorable changes include terminations, downsizing, navigating labor issues, managing difficult customers, outsourcing and adjusting plans due to unforeseen problems.
Whether changes are favorable or unfavorable, leaders need to lead their team through them.
I can think of a great guy who was working for me when I was a Plant Manager. Let's call him Bob for example purposes (not his real name though). Bob was a hard worker. He had high energy, and he got the day-to-day stuff done. Bob was a shopfloor coordinator. He managed the shop floor well and because of his success doing this, he was always looking for a promotion to a leadership role. But he never got promoted. Why? It was because he couldn’t lead change.
When something needed to be coordinated, Bob was our guy. But when a change needed leadership, Bob shrunk away. Despite coaching and formal training, he just could not grasp it. While everyone loved his work ethic and focus, whenever he was given extra responsibility, things unraveled. You see, being great at completing day-to-day tasks doesn’t make someone a leader. Leading change does.
When someone can examine a current-state condition, identify a set of actions to improve the current-state and then lead a team to a new and better future-state, that my friend is a LEADER!
The truth is that nothing maintains. Things either improve or get worse. So, if we’re not constantly improving, then we are backsliding. Anyone who is applying effort to simply “maintain” is actually slowly regressing.
Some people have leadership titles, but they are really performing in the role of a coordinator. They are not true leaders but are maintainers. Long-term, they cannot be successful in their leadership role. As things unravel and regress, their teams get fed-up, their results slip, and the organization is forced to address their deficiency via a reassignment or termination.
Leadership is a minimum wage job except for one aspect: change leadership. A strong leader, one who effectively leads change, is worthy of a good salary. If you are in a leadership role, commit to developing your change management skills. Tools for the Trenches has an excellent training session on this topic in our Advanced Course: CML300.
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