Tag Archives: management

Leadership versus Management – You Need BOTH

Should You Be A Leader or a Manager?

Many people say you should focus on being a Leader, instead of a boss or a Manager. But when you look at the definitions for each you will begin to realize that you need both Leadership and Management in your skillset in order to get things done.

What a Leader Does

A Leader will focus on people and improvement with things like:

  • ✅ Inspiring trust in their people
  • ✅ Looking at the Long-term vision
  • ✅ The WHY behind what the team is doing
  • ✅ Ensuring their team are focusing on the right things to get where they want to go
  • ✅ Challenging the status quo in order to improve and innovate

What a Manager Does

Meanwhile, a Manager will focus on the numbers, administration and getting things done, such as:

  • ☑️ Using Directive leadership and their Positional Power to get things done quickly
  • ☑️ Maintaining the way things are and administrating the day-to-day work
  • ☑️ Focusing on near-term goals for the team to achieve
  • ☑️ Looking at How and When things will be achieved
  • ☑️ Doing things the right way
  • ☑️ Operational issues and problem solving
  • ☑️ Focusing on the bottom line

By combining both the skills of a leader and a manager, you will keep your team engaged and find success in working towards the right goals for your business and project.

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A Framework For Operational Excellence and Customer Obsession

This is a powerful definition of Operational Excellence, how it relates to Customer Obsession and has a huge impact on revenue, profit and employee engagement.  You can download a PDF version for yourself, free.  Enjoy!

 

A Framework For Operational Excellence and Customer Obsession

Operational Excellence.  It’s a term most of us have heard, maybe even used, but when it comes down to it few people know what it really, truly means.  Operational Excellence certainly sounds like something we should want – after all, everyone would say they want their business or team to operate well, and we want it to be excellent rather than average, right?

We need Operational Excellence

Operational Excellence is important enough for Jeff Bezos (the richest man in the world and the CEO of Amazon.com) to mention repeatedly in his shareholder letters, so there has to be some value in it.  And let me ruin the ending for you here – because when it comes to well defined operational excellence there is massive value indeed.

It’s a strategy that has helped Amazon become the most feared (and revered) business of the century so far – sending whole industries running for cover at the slightest mention of working there.  It’s a strategy that helped Toyota thrive for over 100 years in one of the toughest industries on earth.  It’s a strategy that took McDonald’s from one store to over 36,000 stores worldwide, and it’s a strategy that enabled Uber to grow to more than 2,000,000 drivers worldwide.  Bezos says:

Congratulations and thank you to the now over 560,000 Amazonians who come to work every day with unrelenting customer obsession, ingenuity, and commitment to operational excellence.

 

The thing is, when Jeff Bezos talks about customer obsession, he’s not talking about meeting a customer at a cash register and giving them a smile.  He’s talking about reducing any friction a customer might have in doing business with Amazon.com, and making it ridiculously easy for them to buy (and continue to buy) from them.

Which gives us some good news.  When it comes to Customer Obsession and Operational Excellence, those two things are 100% related.

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