Promise-Based Management
Harvard Business Review has a great service where they send subscribers a free daily management tip excerpted from an HBR article. Earlier this week the following tip showed up. The Management Tip was adapted from the Harvard Business Review article “Promise-Based Management: The Essence of Execution,” by Donald N. Sull and Charles Spinosa, April 2007.
At even the best-run companies, critical initiatives lose momentum. Important work sits undone. Emerging opportunities get ignored. The culprits? Poorly crafted promises — those personal pledges employees make to satisfy concerns of stakeholders inside and outside your organization.
Teach employees to craft promises carefully, and work moves forward again. One
key to a well-crafted promise is explicitness — especially when employees and
stakeholders have different cultural backgrounds or a promise involves an
abstract construct (“optimization,” “innovation”) subject to multiple
interpretations. To avoid misunderstandings, have parties make requests clear
from the outset, provide accurate progress reports, and define success (or
failure) at the time of delivery.
What makes a promise explicit?
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Bennet Simonton, author of Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed recently left a comment on pmStudent.com which I really enjoyed.
I really like the point he hit on with Theory X and Theory Y management styles. I see Theory X as someone who relies on formal authority only to order people around, whereas in a Theory Y scenario people would follow their leader regardless of rank or formal status. Theory Y is based mostly on respect and trust built up over time. I believe my views are in accord with what Simonton is saying.
I’m curious, do you believe leaders can exist without being managers? When I wrote that, I was thinking of a “thought leader” or someone similar who does not have management responsibilities, but succeeds in leading people or an organization through their influence on others, creativity and other contributions that impact strategy and direction. An example would be a product developer in a small company who does not manage a team, but generates products and ideas which influence greatly the direction and strategy of the organization. Another example is the front line employee who is a leader on their team using informal authority and through earning the respect and trust of their co-workers.
Let’s keep this conversation going! Leave some comments with your thoughts. Better yet, sign up to become a contributor to pmStudent.com here. All are welcome!
