Glimmerings

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July 25, 2004

First responsibility of a leader

26. Reflect self-mastery in your story

Dee Hock has had conversations with thousands of people about leadership. He notes that when he asks each person to describe the single most important responsibility of any manager, the incredibly diverse responses always have one thing in common: they are downward-looking. Management inevitably is viewed as exercise of authority -- with selecting employees, motivating them, training them, appraising them, organizing them, directing them, controlling them. That perception is mistaken.

According to Hock, the first and paramount responsibility of anyone who purports to manage is to manage self: one's own integrity, character, ethics, knowledge, wisdom, temperament, words, and acts. It is a complex, unending, incredibly difficult, oft-shunned task. We spend little time at, and rarely excel in, the management of the self, precisely because it is so much more difficult than prescribing and controlling the behavior of others. However, without management of self, no one is fit for authority no matter how much they acquire, for the more authority they acquire the more dangerous they become. According to Hock, it is the management of self that should occupy fifty percent of our time and the best of our ability. And when we do that, the ethical, moral and spiritual elements of management are inescapable.

Blog: Steve Denning
Site: http://www.stevedenning.com

Posted by thdyck on July 25, 2004

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