Success Secrets and Stories
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Success Secrets and Stories
Unraveling Goal Setting in Leadership: The Balance of Authority and Innovation Part 1
Embark on a journey to discover the art of effective goal setting and understand why some leaders soar while others falter. Together with Dr. Durst and Zig Ziglar, we dissect the psychological barriers that impede a manager's ability to establish and adhere to meaningful objectives. We also peel back the layers on the unconscious manager's struggle, revealing how fear, self-doubt, and a deficiency in skills can lead to a stagnant professional and personal life. Adding to the mix, Greg Powell brings a jarring real-world tale to the table, showcasing the dire consequences of overlooking goal setting in leadership roles.
As we navigate through the turbulent waters of autocratic leadership styles, you'll learn why creativity and innovation often drown in such environments. We scrutinize three distinct autocratic approaches—directing, permissive, and paternalistic—and their effects on an organization's ambition to achieve its goals. Drawing from my own experiences in highly regimented work settings, we illuminate how excessive control can quash individuality and precipitate a revolving door of employees. But it's not all dire straits; we also discuss the crucial balance between maintaining authority and fostering a workplace that people are excited to be a part of. Stay tuned for our next installment, where we'll continue unraveling the intricate tapestry of goal setting in leadership.
Presented by John Wandolowski and Greg Powell
Welcome everyone to Success Secrets and Stories. I'm your host, john Wondolowski. I'm here with my good friend and co-host, greg Powell Greg, hey, everybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And we're going to be talking about goal setting and what's kind of interesting about the concepts that are associated with management philosophies and things that are associated with what makes up a manager and the different profiles of a manager. Goal setting is one of those starting blocks. Now Dr Durst has a description of management and his description of director, expert, hero, conductor and developer being the top of the pyramid is what he's teaching now. He originally started back when I was taking the course and it was more associated with psychology. So unconscious management, by default, is the first category that Dr Durst uses in his description through psychology, and the first subject that we're going to be talking about is goal setting and avoiding. A person who's in this unconscious approach in terms of management basically avoid setting goals. They rely on previous presidents, previous activities. They're not really interested in doing something new. There's no commitment to the organization. That's unconscious management. So when I was doing the research to talk about this subject, I found a very interesting article by Jen Jenichuk and she was writing about a book called Goals, planning and Action Guide by Zig Ziglar, and this is on her website. It is on soundwisdomcom and it's a blog and she's the director of content for sound wisdom. She has a PhD in English literature so she has a number of other blogs and like work at home, mom and others. Anyway, enough of the commercial side of it. What she was writing about in terms of goals, I think was important to understand for an unconscious manager, and I found her article very interesting because it goes a little bit more detailed than what Dr Durst was talking about, but I think it's based on the same thing.
Speaker 2:From Ziegler's point of view. It's fear, poor self-image, no buy-in or don't know how, never been trained. Those are the kind of characteristics that you see with people who are unconscious in their job as a manager, and those categories just fit so well with people that I've seen that have struggled to handle the job as a manager and they're unconscious. The fear is a realistic problem, um, especially since you're going into areas that you've never seen before, you're asked to do things that you've never done before, and that fear can sometimes lock people up from opportunities. There's also the poor self-image. I think it's kind of from fear, but it also what Ziegler is talking about is that you derive a negative self-image or self-talk and people don't set goals that have that poor image of themselves. Those are one of the challenges in terms of handling the job. The next is no buy-in, and I think I've seen people more along these lines in terms of unconscious management, where they don't want to set goals, they don't recognize it as being important to them. They have either poor training or a hazy idea of what's expected and they're really not monitoring their progress. It's kind of like happening they go about their goals but they never actually establish them, write them, communicate them. It's like that throughout their life. You also see this happening in their home at the same time, that inability to try to plan, and I think the fourth element of it is they don't know how and they avoid goal setting because then they're going to basically be called out for not understanding their job.
Speaker 2:So part of what we're doing with this podcast is we're supposed to be talking about tools. I wrote a book that's associated with our podcast, building your Leadership Toolbox, and this is one of those books that I'm going to be reading is Goals how to Get the Most Out of your Life by Zig Ziglar, and I'd like to tell you that reading a book is important, but usually you don't have time to read a book, and this whole podcast is trying to discuss how you need to do something to improve yourself to be ready for leadership. Reading this book is one of those things that I have as my goal to do for this month. I'd like to read 12 books a year, and this is one of those books that I'm going to be reading. I think that's an important approach in terms of leadership. How are you developing yourself? So a little commercial for a book.
Speaker 2:The next category, in terms of Dr Durst's description from a psychologist's point of view, is the self-protective management by a dictatorship, and setting goals are basically their goals, and they imply that it's for the staff, but it's really their own goals. They feel that their staff are basically involved at a certain level, but it's a sign of weakness. There's a very low commitment to the job and you'll see people sabotage the job when they're in the self-protective. They want to be in a crisis.
Speaker 1:That's the management approach that they like is crisis management. Greg, do you have an idea? Yes, john, I wanted to share a story about goals and requesting goals. This was from a not so distant past, but distant enough.
Speaker 1:We had a senior leadership team and we're talking about back in those days, sarbanes-oxley oh, Sox, sox, remember Sox and compliance started to kind of rear its head, and I remember we were trying to make some decisions on goal setting to make sure we could get through an audit and get through it okay, and one senior leader said why are we doing this? Why do we need goals? We just shoot from the hip like we always do, and usually we're fine and heck, if we get a fine or a penalty, we'll just pay it. What's the big deal? And his peers, myself included, looked at him like you're kidding, aren't you?
Speaker 1:And he wasn't kidding, and John and I had talked about this before. We don't know if he was really thinking it was a $500 fine or 5% of some sales or what have you, but he quickly dismissed wide-make goals. He was going to play the odds. We were able to convince him, though we needed repeatable results and that setting goals to make sure we did that was our best way to make that happen, and it was interesting, as I think about it even now and he was a gunslinger and at a time when we didn't need one.
Speaker 2:Well, those people who are in this crisis management approach, this management approach aren't really interested in input, and we're going to talk about that in a little bit of detail. Whenever I'm getting ready for the podcast, I try to take a look at what's available, that's current online, and I found this really interesting article. Again, if you've been listening to our podcast, I've used this as references before. Indeed editorial team from Indeed the website. It was updated in May 10th of 2023, and it's Autocratic Leadership Pros and Cons. It's a pretty long article. I'm going to try to skim over it just to give you an idea If you have some time.
Speaker 2:That's a very interesting article and indeed has a lot of other management web information that I have found very helpful. So their description in terms of an autocratic leader this bully leader is a strong and independent leader to control and to make decisions that are positively affected into the workplace. Autocratic leadership is when leaders do everything that it takes to complete the task and meet the workplace objectives. It can be beneficial to explore several autocratic leadership pros and cons and then to go on to talk about how this can be applied and applied well. Here's the key. You apply this kind of management from the article whenever there's clear issues in terms of starting an organization, like you're starting up a new McDonald's, you're not interested in trying to get people's input, you're not working with the time to be creative. You're asking for somebody to clearly follow performance expectations.
Speaker 2:There's a very structured environment, the clear description of what leaders are supposed to do and teams are supposed to do. And teams are supposed to do are defined. There are rules and regulations in order to make it happen. So how does that list work out in terms of the pros and cons? Understand, I'm not a big fan of a dictator's approach, but it ensures faster decision-making and it minimizes the hierarchy in order to get decisions done. It enhances workplace communication more in the idea of a one-on-one rather than a team approach. So this is a dictator's kind of approach that they're asking to make sure that you're in compliance and to assure accuracy of the information. The category that it reduces stress for the employee is kind of interesting. I think one of the challenges for stress is something that, greg, you can talk about how a dictator's stress isn't really the best application.
Speaker 1:It is not, john. When employees are looking for their leaders to make decisions, to drive things forward, they're looking for confidence and strength. They're not looking for more stress, they're looking for it right. They want comfort, they want to have the understanding, the belief that their leader knows what they're doing, and they're not trying to create stress in the workplace.
Speaker 2:And the other thing that this position handles is inexperienced teams and inexperienced teams that are looking for people that are going to lead. And that's always the hardest part, especially on an in a new application, a new company, a new franchise that's just opening up. You're not really there to kind of share stories. You want results, that in it. And the article continues in terms of clarifying the structures and roles so that there's compliance, improves crisis management. Because whenever you have this kind of approach, this crisis management mentality, those structures and those kinds of responsibilities and also seeing that the leader has the ability to do the job, boost the morale of the team, understand that I consider it all temporary because that will come back to bite them in a matter of time. It generates positive work environments. But again, when I think about this kind of approach, there just comes to me the mind of the world of GE and Greg. Maybe you can tell a story about the wisdom of GE and the magical 10%.
Speaker 1:So, john, we all can recall back to a leader at General Electric. His name was Jack Welch, some folks called him Neutron Jack. And you can't get much more autocratic than taking out what they call the bottom 10%, the least performers, at 10% every year, and even though that sounds like it could save the company money in headcount, it creates an environment that's cutthroat. It creates an environment that's not as productive and not the kind of place that people want to stay in.
Speaker 2:One of the giggles I got is as that started developing, jack was doing it year after year after year. They would hire 10% and they were nicknamed the lambs, so they were the first ones cut whenever it came to the end of the year and, yeah, after a period of time the organization was having a real hard time keeping people because of turnover. Nobody really wanted to work in that kind of environment long-term. Anyway, greg, maybe you can talk about some of the cons of this process. Thanks, john. Yes, there, talk about some of the cons of this process.
Speaker 1:Thanks, john. Yes, there are several cons of autocratic leadership. One of those that comes quickly to mind is micromanagement. An autocratic leader typically supervises small details of the work team, meaning they're just standing over their shoulder. And if you can think back to Catholic grade school like I can, and the teacher would walk down between the aisles and looking at your paper, looking to see if you had any notes right, just couldn't. You couldn't breathe without Sister Teresa helping you out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the inspirational slap in the back of the head to help that idea get to the front, that's right and those kind of that behavior really stifles productivity and it causes it to go down.
Speaker 1:Creates dependency on the skills of the leader. So now with an autocratic leadership, that person's got to be pretty sharp, pretty well-rounded, pretty experienced, because everything's wrapped around their capability. So if that leader makes the wrong decision, there is no one to hold them accountable. Another con is it discourages a culture of feedback, and you've heard us talk on this podcast before about feedback is a gift. Well, when you got the autocratic type of leadership, a workplace that lacks feedback, that culture can create less creativity, less innovation and the leader really isn't there to get other ideas. If he your opinion, he'll beat it out of you. Well, yeah, just kidding. Just kidding.
Speaker 1:One of the cons of autocratic leadership it creates a high pressure work environment. We talked about that just a little bit ago. You know autocratic leaders make most of the decisions on behalf of their team, which might make them feel stressed, overwhelmed and pressured, and if a leader is unwell or unable to make confident decisions, it affects the rest of the team. So high pressure work environment is not positive and the autocratic leadership style can make that happen. Lacks creativity and I would argue it stifles creativity. When you've got someone running the show iron fist, you can't sometimes come up with creativity at the snap of a finger.
Speaker 2:And so it doesn't foster the environment of creativity. Yeah, and you know, I'm thinking about probably the best way to take a look at this subject, and especially since we're dealing with goals, what we ought to do is let's talk about the type of autocratic leadership. There's three different kind of leaders. Why don't we discuss that for a second.
Speaker 1:Here's some of the common types, john Directing autocratic leadership. Second one is permissive autocratic leadership. And the third one is paternalistic autocratic leadership. So let me walk you through those individually. In the directing autocratic leadership style, those individually In the directing autocratic leadership style, leaders explicitly tell employees what to do, how the heck to do it, when to perform a task, and it also includes close monitoring of people executing the tasks. Again, the cube farm and the manager walking up and down, looking at everybody's cube, making sure things are getting done the way they think they should be done. Permissive autocratic leadership With this style, leaders make the final decision but allow employees to choose how to complete the assigned work. So there's a little bit of buy-in You're telling me what to do but I get to decide how to do it, and that might allow some workplace creativity to complete some workplace goals. And then, finally, paternalistic autocratic leadership the leaders make all the decisions. They're responsible for the well-being of the employees. Such leaders might allow creativity and input from team members.
Speaker 2:So the paternal approach, the taking care of the child, looking over their shoulders you're not going to get goals. And this is discussing. We're trying to discuss the ability for this type of leader to develop goals. I think this is a pretty good discussion to talk about how it doesn't happen. If it does happen, it comes from one person and that kind of environment. If you're thinking it doesn't exist, I can tell you it does in a ton of applications.
Speaker 2:For me, one of my first jobs was working in fast food. For me, I, one of my first jobs was working in fast food and the leaders there basically had it so tightened down that they had videos and they had books and you, you couldn't start on the floor to work in the fast food environment unless you read the books and you did the training tapes. You came out they said that they wanted to see you perform the task to make sure that there was compliance. There was no originality. That whole mentality of setting up goals was something that would never be discussed with the employees. That doesn't happen. What was also interesting about a franchise kind of mentality they're asking people to be following the guidelines almost robotically. So if people don't like that kind of atmosphere you're going to, you're going to see that kind of reject and that turnover start to accelerate. It takes a certain type of employee, it takes a certain type of manager.
Speaker 2:Um, I I'm willing to bet, if you take a look at fast food organizations that have a good team, they're all working on the same page, but they all have similar kind of characteristics and that kind of profile of handling it by crisis and maybe their DNA likes to be in an environment that is pretty structured. That is pretty structured. So you, as a leader, should be understanding what you're dealing with and how you're developing the environment. That's the purpose of what we're doing in this podcast, talking about how leaders are supposed to be able to see this and understand how to change it or maintain it. If you're working in a franchise, understand that it isn't really an organization that wants creativity, so you have to maintain that kind of control, but there should be some fun that's thrown in in order to make the job more palatable. That's how I've seen people handle it in a franchise kind of application.
Speaker 1:So, greg, what are we going to be talking about next podcast? Well, john, for our next episode, we will be continuing our discussion on goal setting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we're going to talk about the next three stages. So the first two are pretty rough, but you start to see the progression and I think we'll have some fun with that. So, if you like what you've heard, my book Building your Leadership Toolbox is available on Amazoncom and Lulucom. The e-book is available on Barnes Noble, if you found this podcast, thank you. If you want others to know about the podcast, it's available on what you're listening to and also Apple, google, spotify and others. Dr Durst's program on his MBA program is on successgrowthacademycom. We've started something new. Buy us a cup of coffee. You can find it on our website on Buzzsprout. The music's brought to you by my grandson and we also want to say that we want to hear from you. So my email address is wandos75.jw at gmailcom and Greg, your email and I can be reached at gpowell374 at gmailcom.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So we want to hear from you and let us know how we're doing and what else you would like to hear.
Speaker 1:So, thanks Greg, thanks John, as always. Next time, next time yeah.