Be a good leader.

The results of two recent studies suggest that it is a mistake to assume that you can manage your way to performance. In one of the studies, researchers gave dozens of employees a particularly difficult task that required them to work together as a team. The hard part was that some of the employees were strangers. (Think of it as the ultimate blind date.) In addition, the researchers made the task even more difficult by telling the employees that their success depended on the success of the group, not on the individual. Then the researchers divided the employees into three groups. The first group received no training, the second group received training in team skills, and the third group received training in both team skills and leadership skills.

You might assume that the group that received training in both leadership skills and team skills would outperform the other two groups. But that’s not what happened. The team-skills group did the best. The leadership-skills group did the worst.

The researchers didn’t stop there. They wanted to test the idea that the team-skills group did so well because they had learned a leadership style that was appropriate for the task at hand. So the researchers gave the team-skills group an entirely different task: one that required them to influence the way a customer thought about his choice between two products. In this case, the researchers concluded, the team-skills group didn’t do so well. In fact, the leadership-skills group did slightly better.

In other words, the researchers concluded, the leadership style that is most effective depends on the kind of task you are trying to accomplish. And the most important thing to learn is what kinds of tasks require leadership skills, and what kinds don’t.

The second study focused on a more specific kind of task: that of making change happen within a bureaucracy. The researchers gave employees the task of making a proposal for change to their organization and then persuading other employees to buy in and implement the change. Some of the employees were given training in leadership skills, some were given training in the skills needed to make change happen within a bureaucracy, and some were given both.

In this case, the researchers concluded, the bureaucratic-skills group didn’t do so well. In fact, the leadership-skills group did slightly better.

In other words, the researchers concluded, the leadership style that is most effective depends on the nature of the task you are trying to accomplish. And the most important thing to learn is what kinds of tasks require leadership skills, and what kinds don’t.

The upshot of these two studies is that it’s a mistake to assume that you can manage your way to performance. The research suggests that you need to learn to ask yourself whether a task requires leadership skills, bureaucratic skills, or both. And you need to make sure your employees get the right kind of training for the kind of task they are trying to accomplish.

The lesson from these studies is that you need to look at the task first and ask what it takes to get it done. Only then can you look at the employees you have and ask what they need to do their jobs.

GamdAi Media
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  Photo by Rebrand Cities.