Transformation - Leadership and Management

It is interesting what you find when you go through your drawers, well metaphorically anyway. The actual exercise was going through my old PC directories to see what was still interesting and relevant. I found the picture included below - reproduced here without any changes.

It dates from 2008 and appears to have been drawn in Visio, but I have no recall of ever creating it. Similarly I have no recollection of receiving it. As a result I can neither claim to be the creator nor attribute it to anyone else.

That said when I looked at it again(?) I thought it was quite insightful and worth sharing.

In essence it uses the ubiquitous 2x2 matrix with leadership (poor to strong) going up the y-axis and management (again poor to strong) going along the x-axis and looks at the likely outcomes of a transformational effort in each quadrant.

I suspect we could each define leadership and management, but for now I will use again the Kottor line

"Leadership is doing the right things, management is about doing things right"

As I read each quadrant I was struck by how true this was, at least in my experience with the firms I have worked for. Most seem to fall into either the top left (strong leadership, poor management) or bottom right (poor leadership, strong management).

Any effort that started off in the lower left square has typically had stronger management added and as a result stepped to the right. I guess that the problem cannot be with leadership, so it has to be stronger management that is needed? :)

I struggle to think of more than a couple of instances where I have seen a organisation or part of one occupy the upper right and quadrant. Something to think about, eh?