I focus on change management and the problem you address haunts many major projects. The organization does a fine job of creating goals/vision for a project and then fails during implementation. There are many reasons why things fail at that stage, but a major reason is that the organization fails to reward and recognize accomplishments related to the new direction. And, this oversight is compounded when leaders fail to hire and promote based on what’s needed in the new environment.

Rick Maurer
http://www.beyondresistance.com
http://www.changemanagementnews.com (blog)

Let’s see how this works.

Leadership applies to people and denotes the sending of value standard messages to people which most of them then follow/use. Thus we say that they have been “led” in the direction of those standards. Leadership is one side of the coin called values, the other side being followership.

Leadership in the workplace consists of the value standards reflected in everything that an employee experiences. Most of what the employee experiences is the support or lack thereof provided by management - such as training, tools, parts, discipline, direction, material, procedures, rules, technical advice, documentation, information, etc.

Leadership is not a process any manager can change. It happens inexorably every minute of every day because of the way people are. The only choice available to the manager is the standard (good, bad or mediocre) toward which to lead.

Managing, on the other hand, applies to the effective use of a resource such as money, supply chain, production, people or what-have-you. People are just one of many different resources to manage, each having methods that will succeed, methods that will fail and many in between the extremes.

For instance, the top-down command and control technique is a specific method by which to manage people. Top-down concentrates on producing goals, targets, visions, orders and other directives in order to control the workforce and thereby achieve organizational success. Top-down treats employees like robots in the “shut up and listen, I know better than you” mode, and rarely if ever listens to them.

In this way and others, top-down demeans and disrespects employees sending them very negative value standard messages. The standards reflected in this treatment “lead” the employees to treat their work, their customers, each other and their bosses with the same level of disrespect they received. This is the road to very poor corporate performance making top-down managers their own worst enemies.

If you want to lead employees to very high performance, get rid of all traces of a top-down approach. Start treating employees with great respect and not like robots by listening to whatever they want to say when they want to say it and responding in a very respectful manner, thus leading them to treat their work, their customers, each other and their bosses with great respect. (Everyone wants to do a good job, don’t want to be told what to do, and do want to be trained and coached so that they can do well.)

You will be stunned as I was by the huge amount of creativity, innovation and productivity you have unleashed. Besides, most of them will love to come to work.

Best regards, Ben
Author “Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed”

Thanks for the response. My original thoughts were around continuing to use I2 in conjunction with Web2.0 (the applications and the technology underpinnings).

http://tametheweb.com/2006/11/internet_2_and_web_20.html

Although I2 is non-profit, business should be able to benefit from the research.