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“Like, can’t you drive us anywhere without getting us lost in some spooky old castle, Fred?” asked Shaggy. “Howzabout lettin’ someone else drive?”
“Me drive, me drive, ohboyohboyohboy!!!” came a muffled dog’s voice from the back of the van.
“You can’t drive, silly… you don’t even have opposable thumbs!” reminded Velma.
“No way, man! Like, Velma, if someone else drove, like, we wouldn’t always get stuck in those creepy mysteries!” said Shaggy, who didn’t like where all this was leading.
“But I like mysteries, Shaggy,” said Velma, who did like where all this was leading.
“I think Fred should drive,” chimed in Daphne.
“You heard her, guys, and it’s her van. Besides, none of you know the way!” said Fred, relieved that he’d get to continue driving (and he could still sit next to Daphne).
Before we can get into the fun part of this book, showing how Scooby and the gang are really surprisingly strong models of many leadership and management principles, we have to answer one very important question:
What is Leadership, Anyway?
I begin many of my workshops and seminars with that question, and it always amazes me the blank stares I receive in reply. It doesn’t matter if I’m training high school students or industry professionals, the question seems to boggle everybody. I can usually count on someone in the back of the room to call out “the act of leading” or “being a leader,” but most people simply put on a perplexed face and think about the question for a bit.
Sometimes some brave soul will stand up and say, “Good management?” If they do, I’ll ask the group what management is, and then somebody in the back will call out, “Poor leadership!” Clever.
Mirriam Webster of dictionary fame is similarly unhelpful: the first definition of leadership given is “the position or function of a leader.” His definition of the word leader begins, “a person or thing that leads,” and the word ‘lead’ comes with no less than 46 definitions… far too many for a simple dog like Scooby-Doo to easily remember or make sense of. To be honest, I personally would have trouble remembering 46 definitions, too, so I’d like to find something simpler.
In the hopes that perhaps an Expert Opinion might provide me with an answer, I ventured to my local book store and paged through one of their best-selling books on the topic of leadership. Instead of a definition, though, I saw in the book a diagram. A very, very detailed diagram, with lots of arrows and boxes and color-coding and words of five syllables or more. I thought to myself that if this is the definition of leadership, it’s no wonder nobody can remember it. The contents of the diagram, once deciphered, actually were quite intelligent and made a great deal of sense; but by the time I’d finally figured out what it all meant, I’d forgotten why I asked.
After perusing several books on leadership and management, I came to the conclusion that these books can be divided into two categories: books in the first category teach leadership through charts, graphs, theories, and large words, while books from the second teach leadership through stories, anecdotes, experience, and common sense. While the first category generally looks more impressive and their authors certainly seem very intelligent, it was only the books that fell within the second category that actually taught me something. Many of the “chart-style” books recommended hanging copies of their complicated diagrams above your desk or workspace, so that you could stare at them every day and try to remember what it was the book was teaching. Personally, I never thought that a real leader would need a picture to refresh his memory on what leadership was, but maybe I’m just naïve. I preferred to read the books that broke leadership down into a series of simple, common-sense, easily applicable lessons. That way I could actually learn valuable management skills instead of just trying to memorize a pretty picture that might not be applicable at all in real world settings.
By reading books that showed how simple leadership really was, I attained a far greater understanding of the skills and psychology of management. I didn’t have to try to memorize it; I’d already learned it. That’s the approach you’ll find in this book. You won’t find complicated charts, ten syllable words, or unproven theories. Instead, you’ll discover lessons from real-world experience, common sense management, and (of course!) the joy of cartoons.
Art or science?
Several books discuss “management science” or the “science of leadership,” which woefully misleads their readers. The difference between science and art is simple: in science, there is one and only one correct answer. For instance, a normal human body always has the same number of bones. The periodic table of elements always begins with hydrogen. One plus one always equals two. In art, on the other hand, a concept called equifinality is the order of the day. Equifinality means that there are many roads to success, possibly an infinite number. Could you only use watercolors for a beautiful painting? Is there only one kind of joke that would actually be funny? Is there only one correct way to say, “I love you”? Of course not. There are an infinite number of ways to approach these tasks, and many completely different approaches will lead to an equal degree of success. That’s equifinality.
There are some supervisors in the world who would tell you that good leadership is a science; that yes, there is only one way to do it right. I’ve worked for several of these supervisors, and odds are you have as well, dear reader. They are easily the worst people in the world to work for. They don’t understand that everybody has their own unique leadership style, and that what works for one may not work for all. Usually, these pseudo-leaders’ belief that their way is the only way is based on the assumption that their followers are, for lack of a better term, human scum. They believe that people are inherently untrustworthy, and that all employees or team members must be watched and scrutinized very closely to ensure that they’re doing their job (and not stealing anything). Thus, to them, there would be only one way to lead: watch your people like hawks and assume that they’re all stupid.
While it’s true that some people certainly are rather undependable, assumptions like the ones above lead to miserable working conditions and inefficient use of labor. After all, if a manager is spending all of his time monitoring his employees’ activities (that’s called micromanagement), then the manager won’t have time to work on higher-level functions like strategic planning or training and development. Employee morale (and thus productivity) will be low, and nobody will ever really be provided with a compelling reason to perform above and beyond expectations. This, obviously, is the formula for a failing enterprise, and let’s be honest: we’ve all worked someplace like that at one point in our lives, haven’t we? We didn’t have very high loyalty or motivation while we were there, either.
There is no one correct way to be a manager or leader, and what works for one person may not work for another. Some people are born to lead autocratically, and that approach can work, believe it or not. Some people are perfectly capable of keeping their teams focused and their employees happy while they lead with an iron fist. However, if somebody with more of a laid-back approach to work were to see this iron-fisted leadership method and think, “So that’s how it’s done! I should try to copy that,” they’d be dooming themselves to a miserable failure. We each have our own optimal leadership approach, based on our own working style and ethic. Scooby’s pal Fred, for instance, leads well as a “take-charge” kind of guy, delegating and directing. Velma, on the other hand, leads more subtly, by suggesting and planning from the background. Both approaches work, and one isn’t necessarily better than the other.
Because we have more than one road to success, leadership is an art and not a science. Leadership does have some elements of science in it, though, because all good leaders have a few things in common. For instance, all good leaders have a certain level of respect for the members of their team. All good leaders keep an open mind for new ideas when approached by their followers. Despite the concept of equifinality, there are some rules of good leadership that simply cannot be broken without seriously hampering your team’s effectiveness… and isn’t having an effective team one of the most important reasons for developing leadership?
Because leadership is an art, this book won’t attempt to tell you exactly how you should lead. You’ll see several different methods of leadership in this book (the Shaggy way, the Fred way, et cetera), but you shouldn’t look at any of them as necessarily the right way. Your best method of leadership will be the one that you yourself imagine and create, drawing from your own personality, your personal experiences, and maybe even the ideas presented in this book and others like it.
In other words, this book won’t tell you how to be a good leader; instead, hopefully, it will show you how to figure out for yourself what makes a good leader.
Leadership vs. Management
You’ve seen me use the words ‘leadership’ and ‘management’ almost interchangeably so far in this book, because I’m not convinced that there’s all that much of a difference between the two. Their dictionary definitions are nearly identical, although there are certain distinct concepts implied by each. While leadership brings to mind things like inspiration and duty, management implies manipulation, business, and perhaps even success. In my own perception, management is simply a “level” of leadership. A good manager can get the job done and bring his team together, but it takes more than that to really make the team all that it could be. The real leader is the manager who takes it to the next level. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Personally, I’d define a supervisor as anybody who is in charge of a group of people. Remember when you worked at that fast-food place when you were young? Remember how you hated the way your boss was always yelling at everybody? Remember the way everybody hated the boss and employee turnover was amazingly high? Your boss was a supervisor.
A manager, on the other hand, is a supervisor who actually brings the team together to accomplish their goals. Odds are pretty good that the boss you have right now is a manager. Most managers believe that they are, in fact, leaders, but I tend to think that it takes more than a promotion and a fancy job title to be a leader. A real leader’s outputs are much greater than those of a manager: while managers may have accomplished several goals, leaders will surpass those goals and command an amazing level of respect from their teams.
A leader, a truly rare person, is a manager who actually motivates you, someone who inspires her subordinates, someone who makes everybody want not only to succeed, but to take it to a level that it has never been at before. You may have worked for a real leader at one point or you might not have; as I said, they’re very rare. The usual symptoms of a team led by a real leader are job satisfaction, high productivity, and rampant promotions. One of the challenges of being a leader is having to face constant employee turnover; not because they quit or are fired, but because they get promoted so quickly!
Basic supervisory skills lead to good management, and decent management is where many training courses stop. That’s OK, of course, if a basic ‘keep-getting-what-we’ve-always-gotten’ success is all you’re looking for out of your team. However, if you want your group to really feel the need to make a difference, not just in work but in their own lives, it’s true leadership that you’re looking for. And just as management skills are the best supervisory skills, the best management skills are true leadership.
But then again, words are words, and we don’t want to limit ourselves to mere words… for an accurate discussion of leadership, we have to talk about emotions, motivations, and other concepts that are hard to describe in a book. Don’t let the vocabulary limit you. Draw from your own experiences, read what’s written here, and come to your own conclusion.
So… ah… what was leadership?
Your definition may be as good as mine, but I tend to draw the definition of leadership from what was stated above. Leadership is the art of bringing your team together through motivation and inspiration to accomplish your goals. It’s that simple. Management is the basic skill-set or ideology necessary to make that happen. Here’s how I look at it: if, at the end of the day, my team accomplished their goals, and they’re happy, and they’re creative, and they’re motivated to start something new, exciting, and completely different, then I’ve done a good job of leading them. Because leadership is where you start to see previously undreamed-of levels of productivity and success, I personally want to become the best leader I can be.
But that’s just my definition. There are many great leaders who have their own, completely different, and yet just-as-correct definitions of leadership. Take Fred Jones, for instance, who assures me that he is “the extremely successful leader of the Scooby-Doo Gang, Mystery, Inc.”:
“Leadership is delegation and direction. Somebody has to take charge and tell people what to do and how to do it, otherwise they’ll just run around and eat stuff. That person may as well be me. Chicks dig me.”
Or ask a quieter member of the quintet, Daphne Blake:
“It’s getting the job done and it’s working with the others to solve the mystery. We all take our turns at being the leader… some more subtly than others. It’s manipulating your team to get things done. You don’t necessarily have to be walking in front to be the leader.”
Manipulating? Well, in a way, yes, I suppose you could say that. Here’s what Velma had to say:
“Leadership is the act or instance of leading, to guide in direction, to be in control or command, to go before or with to show the way, to cause or induce, to serve or bring to a place, to conduct or direct, to use executive ability, to…”
Ah… yes, thank you, Velma, you can stop now. Shaggy, can you give us something a bit simpler?
“Like wow, man, leadership is super cool, but, like, I’m not sure what it is. But it sure is groovy when we’re all working together, y’know?”
And then there’s good old Scooby-Doo’s definition of leadership:
“Rrrreadership? Is rrhat a pasta?”
To each their own.
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