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 The Leader’s Handbook:
by Peter R. Scholtes
McGraw-Hill, 415 pps.
ISBN: 0070580286
Adapted from Clinical Leadership Management Review (Permission given to reprint. Click here to visit the website)
Peter Scholtes book The Leader’s Handbook is designed to “at least trouble the mind and shake the brains, even if you don’t accept the message.” Peter Scholtes hopes that it will do better than that, and will “provide some useful guidance and insights into developing a better approach to leadership for all those organizations with which you are associated.”
Some of his “unconventional” teachings:
- More than 95% of your organization’s problems derive from your systems, processes and methods, not from your individual workers. Improving systems takes a concerted, well-planned, usually cross-functional effort led from the top of the organization. Without conscious attention to systems, you will focus on people. Your people are doing their best, but their best efforts cannot compensate for your inadequate and dysfunctional syste
- Peter Scholtes states that changing the system will change what people do. Changing what people do will not change the system. A well-run organization with well-functioning systems allows people from top to bottom to do work of which they can be proud.
- When you can work well together doing worthwhile work you can create a joyful workplace.
- Current buzzwords like empowerment, accountability, and high performance are meaningless, empty babble. They create only cynicism and resentment.
- 95% of the changes undertaken in organizations have nothing to do with improvement. “In a world without data, opinion prevails.”
- The greatest conceit of managers, says author Peter Scholtes is that they can motivate people. If they try, they will only make things worse.
- Everything is a system, and we are part of it (Deming)
In this book, Peter Scholtes demonstrates that the old competencies of management, such as assertiveness, forcefulness (control), bottom-line and task-orientation is inadequate and ineffective in today’s global marketplace. Old assumptions, such as external motivation and performance appraisals, are based on false ideas of why and how employees work well. External motivators don’t work, because the most powerful motivators are intrinsic. Peter emphasizes the need for separating pay and performance, and for closing the ratio between CEOs and hourly workers
Peter shows how a leader can be effective, using new methods of competency. These methods emphasize the need to think in systems, to understand the different types of variation inherent in systems, and the need to understand how people learn and function. Good leaders understand the interrelationship of all the different aspects of business, and
- Give people the what, why, where and when,
- Look for purpose outside the organization,
- Are committed to their customers, and believe that the company should serve the customers,
This is in stark contrast to the “dismal” leaders that
- Encourage competitiveness, not teamwork
- Function in chaos,
- Distrust their employees,
- Fail to communicate anything but meaningless management babble.
As Peter Scholtes points out, “There is a new way to do business, a new philosophy of leadership, a new way to get work done. It is more effective than the old, and is a whole lot more fun.”
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