By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to develop both the manager and the leader in you. Reading time 2:34

Your salad is wilted. Your steak, cold. Your temper, boiling And your collar, broiling! You are furious at the poor service. You summon the waiter and demand to see the restaurant MANAGER. You don’t ask to see the leader. You want the person in charge, the person IN CONTROL!

Managers are in control. They roll up their sleeves and “direct by hand,” as the dictionary defines the word “manager.”

I always found it very instructive that the word “manage” comes from the Latin “manus” which means hand.

After all, managers organize the chaos, make sense of it, and get some control of it. That’s why the dining public is willing to give a bad restaurant another chance if they know that TODAY it is “under new management.”

But tomorrow, with changing market conditions and patron preferences, efficient managing skills are necessary but not sufficient. Managers evolve into leaders in embracing change, anticipating trends, adapting and adjusting everything and anything from ambiance to menus.

Under New Management-Ship

This managing-leading combo is so fully intertwined in the long-term success of the enterprise — so critical in building on the strengths of each other, so energizing and synergizing both in controlling today and in adapting to tomorrow-that the sign in a restaurant under new ownership might more accurately read: “Under new Management-ship.”

Indeed the most well-nourished organizations dine on the management-leadership combo.

After all, growing organizations need both control and change -both analysts and catalysts, both reactors and responders, both commanders and commenders, both conformers and reformers. Both managers and leaders. And the most successful leaders are efficient managers FIRST.

That’s why you cannot be an excellent leader without first becoming a good manager, as author Elwood N. Chapman notes in his book Put More Leadership Into Your Style. Yet you can be an efficient manager without ever becoming an effective leader. It’s a matter of focus.

That’s why restaurants and other businesses sometimes fall out of favor with their customers. Management persisted in holding to business as usual. But then the marketplace changed. The customers changed. But the business didn’t.

Leaders embrace that change. In fact, leaders cash in on change and keep the cash register ringing. Especially in the restaurant business. Bon Appetit!

Today’s ImproveMINT
Develop both your managing and leading skills to keep your leadership thinking in mint condition.

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