Country Club or Chain Gang?

Mind Tools Newsletter 60 - 31st October 2006 This newsletter is published by Mind Tools Ltd of 2nd Floor, 145-157 St John Street, London, EC1V 4PY, UK. You have received it because you have subscribed to our double opt-in newsletter. To subscribe or unsubscribe, just click the links at the bottom of this email.

Contents: What's New? The Blake-Mouton Managerial Grid Mind Tools Store A Final Note

Is your boss a country club style of manager, or does working within your team feel like working on a chain gang? And how do you think it feels for the people who report to you?

People tend to have a natural preference either for focusing on tasks or for focusing on people, but rarely on both. Too much focus on people, and you're in the Country Club - a great place to work, but not very productive. Too much focus on tasks, and you're on the chain gang, with team members feeling oppressed and undervalued.

This week’s tool – the Blake Mouton Managerial grid, helps you think about your preferred style and find the right balance, so becoming an even better leader!

The Blake Mouton tool is a great one to share with newly-promoted managers too: Often a new manager is promoted to the role because he or she gets the job done well. However the first taste of managerial responsibility can be quite bitter if the new manager continues to focus on tasks, and doesn't work to develop the people management skills needed for success.

What's New?

Among the articles published at Mind Tools in the last two weeks is “Optimism –The Hidden Asset”. Written by regular Mind Tools contributor and emotional intelligence expert Bruna Martinuzzi, this thoroughly enjoyable article provides some very practical tips to help you develop and reap the benefits of optimism in your life and workplace.

Bruna shows us that “Optimism is an emotional competence that can help boost productivity, enhance employee morale, overcome conflict and have a positive impact on the bottom line.” Her 10 practical tips include using positive language. Here’s one we’ve adopted here in the Mind Tools office: “Do you frequently say: ‘yes, but....’ in response to suggestions? The ‘but’ automatically negates anything you have said in the beginning part of the sentence. A simple shift to ‘yes, and...’ might make a positive difference”. Read it, try it, and feel the benefits! (Thank you, Bruna).

Meanwhile, in our members' area (the Career Excellence Club) members are enjoying articles and events on topics ranging from assertiveness and performing under pressure, through to formulating personal career strategy.

Among others, our piece on Assertiveness led to forum discussions on becoming more assertive, while appearing less aggressive and arrogant. Career and life coach, Sharon Juden, supported members dealing with anxiety about new responsibilities or promotions. And our resident trainer, Dianna Podmoroff, led the first in a series of training sessions on career strategy.

There’s much more to come, with 4 new resources and Club events each week, focused on helping members achieve lasting career success. Click here to join us!

So enjoy your read here, and at the Mind Tools site!

James & Rachel

James Manktelow and Rachel Thompson
MindTools.com
Mind Tools – Essential skills for an excellent career!

To find out about new tools on the Mind Tools site the moment they’re uploaded, click here to subscribe to the Mind Tools RSS feed (you'll need an RSS newsreader installed), or here to find out more about RSS.

New Article
The Blake Mouton Managerial Grid
Balancing Task- and People-Oriented Leadership

When your boss puts you in charge of organizing the company Christmas party, what do you do first? Do you develop a time line and start assigning tasks or do you think about who would prefer to do what and try to schedule around their needs? When the planning starts to fall behind schedule, what is your first reaction? Do you chase everyone to get back on track, or do you ease off a bit recognizing that everyone is busy just doing his/her job, let alone the extra tasks you’ve assigned?

Your answers to these types of questions can reveal a great deal about your personal leadership style. Some leaders are very task-oriented; they simply want to get things done. Others are very people-oriented; they want people to be happy. And others are a combination of the two. If you prefer to lead by setting and enforcing tight schedules, you tend to be more production-oriented (or task-oriented). If you make people your priority and try to accommodate employee needs, then you’re more people-oriented.

Neither preference is right or wrong, just as no one type of leadership style is best for all situations. However, it's useful to understand what your natural leadership tendencies are, so that you can then working on developing skills that you may be missing.

A popular framework for thinking about a leader’s ‘task versus person’ orientation was developed by Robert Blake and Jane Mouton in the early 1960s. Called the Managerial Grid, or Leadership Grid, it plots the degree of task-centeredness versus person-centeredness and identifies five combinations as distinct leadership styles.

Understanding the Model

The Managerial Grid is based on two behavioral dimensions:

• Concern for People – This is the degree to which a leader considers the needs of team members, their interests, and areas of personal development when deciding how best to accomplish a task
  
  
• Concern for Production – This is the degree to which a leader emphasizes concrete objectives, organizational efficiency and high productivity when deciding how best to accomplish a task.

Using the axis to plot leadership ‘concerns for production’ versus ‘concerns for people’, Blake and Mouton defined the following five leadership styles:

Country Club Leadership – High People/Low Production
This style of leader is most concerned about the needs and feelings of members of his/her team. These people operate under the assumption that as long as team members are happy and secure then they will work hard. What tends to result is a work environment that is very relaxed and fun but where production suffers due to lack of direction and control.

Produce or Perish Leadership – High Production/Low People
Also known as Authoritarian or Compliance Leaders, people in this category believe that employees are simply a means to an end. Employee needs are always secondary to the need for efficient and productive workplaces. This type of leader is very autocratic, has strict work rules, policies, and procedures, and views punishment as the most effective means to motivate employees.

Impoverished Leadership – Low Production/Low People
This leader is mostly ineffective. He/she has neither a high regard for creating systems for getting the job done, nor for creating a work environment that is satisfying and motivating. The result is a place of disorganization, dissatisfaction and disharmony.

Middle-of-the-Road Leadership – Medium Production/Medium People
This style seems to be a balance of the two competing concerns. It may at first appear to be an ideal compromise. Therein lies the problem, though: When you compromise, you necessarily give away a bit of each concern so that neither production nor people needs are fully met. Leaders who use this style settle for average performance and often believe that this is the most anyone can expect.

Team Leadership – High Production/High People
According to the Blake Mouton model, this is the pinnacle of managerial style. These leaders stress production needs and the needs of the people equally highly. The premise here is that employees are involved in understanding organizational purpose and determining production needs. When employees are committed to, and have a stake in the organization’s success, their needs and production needs coincide. This creates a team environment based on trust and respect, which leads to high satisfaction and motivation and, as a result, high production.

Applying the Blake Mouton Managerial Grid

Being aware of the various approaches is the first step in understanding and improving how well you perform as a manager. It is important to understand how you currently operate, so that you can then identify ways of becoming competent in both realms.

Step One: Identify your leadership style.

• Think of some recent situations where you were the leader.
  
• For each of these situations, place yourself in the grid according to where you believe you fit.
  
• Click here for a more formal identification of where your style sits on the Blake Mouton Managerial Grid, and complete the online questionnaire.

Step Two: Identify areas of improvement and develop your leadership skills

• Look at your current leadership method and critically analyze its effectiveness.
  
• Look at ways you can improve. Are you settling for ‘middle of the road’ because it is easier than reaching for more?
  
• Identify ways to get the skills you need to reach the Team Leadership position. These may include involving others in problem solving or improving how you communicate with them, if you feel you are too task-oriented. Or it may mean becoming clearer about scheduling or monitoring project progress if you tend to focus too much on people.
  
• Continually monitor your performance and watch for situations when you slip back into bad old habits.

Step Three: Put the Grid in Context
It is important to recognize that the Team Leadership style isn’t always the most effective approach in every situation. While the benefits of democratic and participative management are universally accepted, there are times that call for more attention in one area than another. If your company is in the midst of a merger or some other significant change, it is often acceptable to place a higher emphasis on people than on production. Likewise, when faced with an economic hardship or physical risk, people concerns may be placed on the back burner, for the short-term at least, to achieve high productivity and efficiency.

Note: Theories of leadership have moved on a certain amount since the Blake Mouton Grid was originally proposed. In particular, the context in which leadership occurs is now seen as an important driver of the leadership style used. And in many situations, the "Team Leader" as an ideal has moved to the ideal of the "Transformational Leader": Someone who, according to leadership researcher Bernard Bass: Is a model of integrity and fairness; Sets clear goals; Has high expectations; Encourages; Provides support and recognition; Stirs people's emotions; Gets people to look beyond their self-interest; and Inspires people to reach for the improbable.

Key Points

The Blake Mouton Managerial Grid is a practical and useful framework that helps you think about your leadership style. By plotting ‘concern for production’ against ‘concern for people’, the grid highlights how placing too much emphasis in one area at the expense of the other leads to low overall productivity.

The model proposes that when both people and production concerns are high, employee engagement and productivity increases accordingly. This is often true, and it follows the ideas of Theories X and Y, and other participative management theories.

While the grid does not entirely address the complexity of “Which leadership style is best?”, it certainly provides an excellent starting place to critically analyze your own performance and improve your general leadership skills.

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The Mind Tools Store:

• The Career Excellence Club: The Mind Tools Career Excellence Club is the Mind Tools members' area. In it, you get a steady and easily-manageable stream of career- and life-enhancing information, training and coaching. With member-only discussion forums, the Mind Tools Extended Toolkit, downloadable MP3-based Book Insights and Interviews and much, much more, the Career Excellence Club puts you back on the fast track to career success. Find out more >>
  
  
• Multi-User Licensing Center:strong> License Mind Tools programs and article for your training or in-house event. More >>
  
  
• Make Time for Success: Learn 39 essential personal effectiveness techniques that help you bring your workload under control and maximize your productivity, so that you can make the most of the opportunities open to you. More >>
  
  
• How to Lead: Discover the Leader Within You: Learn the 48 simple but essential skills you need to become a top leader in your industry. More >>
  
  
• The Mind Tools E-book: All of the tools on the Mind Tools website in one convenient, easily-downloadable, easily-printable PDF file. We have excluded advertising to enhance clarity and have formatted sections to be easy to read, print and use. More >>
  
  
• Personal Coaching from Career Excellence Professionals:Find career and life direction, bring your job under control, build self-confidence and put yourself on the path to long term success with a Mind Tools coach. Our coaches give you the focused personal coaching you need to make the very most of your career and life. More >>

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A Final Note From James

Whether you are a task-centered or people-centered manager, I hope Blake Mouton has given you some food for thought. Why not pass it on to any new managers in your workplace? It’s an insight that new managers especially can really benefit from.

Our upcoming articles will help you both with people focused and task focused skills, so look out for what’s new at the site and in the next newsletter.

Have a successful (and balanced) week!

James

James Manktelow

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