Leadership Grid
Categories: Company Management
A “leadership grid” is a chart that basically shows where a certain leader falls with regard to concern for results versus concern for people.
To demonstrate how this works, we’d like to share a tale of two managers: Luke and Leia.
Leia is a taskmaster. She’s all about getting stuff done. After all, companies exist to make money, right? So she’s going to focus all of her attention on making sure deadlines are met, goals are accomplished, and deliverables are…delivered.
Then we’ve got Luke, the peopliest people person at the company. He’s totally in tune with the moods and needs of his team members, and if there are personnel issues going on, resolving those can take precedence over meeting organizational production goals. After all, money is only money, right? People are a company’s most important asset. The rest is just noise.
Luke and Leia are obviously very different leaders. On a leadership grid that plots “concern for results” on the X-axis and “concern for people” on the Y-axis, Luke and Leia would be in very different places.
The point of the leadership grid is to show managers and other leaders where they fall on the grid, and the impact that might be having on productivity. Because, as we instinctively know, the manager who is all about results but is a horror show to work for probably isn’t going to get the same work ethic out of her people as someone who is a little more personable. But, on the other hand, the manager who wants to be everybody’s friend all the time but never cracks the whip...probably isn’t going to have the most productive team.
Anyhoo, there are five leadership styles identified by where a person places on the grid: indifferent/impoverished (low scores on both axes), status quo (middle of the grid), dictatorial (high X value, low Y value, like Leia), country club (low X value, high Y value, like Luke), and team (high scores on both axes). The team style is the goal: a high focus on both results and people tends to lead to high levels of productivity and job satisfaction. When leaders can see themselves on the grid, the hope is that the visual tool will help them change their behavior so they can move on up into that coveted team-style area.
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Finance a la shmoop... what are CEOs, CFOs and COOs lots of C's you know sort of
like most of our high school report cards but it's a different story [Girl given a school report card with list of C grades]
all right so the C here for all of these stands for chief not the C in
big cheese and the O here for all of these stands for officer...
But sort of in that vein cop ish like when you are one of these
officers it's your watch your beat your patrol and all that the delimiter here
is the middle letter so let's start at the top there E the E in CEO stands for
executive and distinctively the CEO is hired by the board of directors who in
turn is elected by the common shareholders the CEO is in charge of and [Woman CEO standing in her office]
well pretty much everything basically executing on the mandate which is to
make money over the long term for shareholders the CEO deals with both
internal operational and financial issues as well as dealing directly with
shareholders externally you know on the outside people ie those Wall Street folk [People working in Wall Street]
and she is generally you know where the buck stop...okay
moving on and that'll make some nice venison....Okay the CFO is
hired by the CEO and while on bad days the F might stand for something else
on a normal day the F stands for financial, the chief financial officer
deals with the dollar numbers the bean-counting [CFO counting beans]
from hiring and paying people usually via the head of human resources hired by
the CFO to tracking profitability of divisions which the CFO usually does in
concert with others in the company to you know dealing with Wall Street people [CFO holding a chicken wing]
as the wing man to the CEO at rubber chicken lunches
well if the company is
gonna raise debt to go buy a competitor or sell equity from insiders in a
secondary offering or use stock to acquire a tools company which will let
it operate more efficiently well all of that goes through the CFOs highly [A cluttered desk of beans]
cluttered desk all right so moving on then there's the COO and if you say
it all together it sounds like a bird but it's not the middle O there stands
for operating well other than in a company which just does surgery all day [a heart monitor in a surgery room]
the operating officer doesn't actually do surgery rather she operates the
company and usually that involves asking a thousand questions hopefully not all
at once like that Fed Ex guy who had too much caffeine are we getting the best
prices on the raw plastic we're ordering from war-torn New Zealand, are we making
enough selfie helmets, and is your dad still disappointed with you for getting
a C in accounting 101 back in high school
mm-hmm? just keeping it real there pal... well we can't answer the first two
and as for the last one well you're a COO oh you can probably afford a nice
shrink now so go work out your issues [COO laying on sofa talking with psychiatrist]