Push Or Pull; What works?
Leadership can be a tricky skill. From racing to achieve P&L expectations to the team-talent-process management, leaders are custodians of a handful… Leadership transcends mere technical expertise; it demands meticulous planning and the adept execution of collective efforts orchestrated by a capable team.
Even with a faint visibility of the processes or the end goal, planning a temporary structure would be easier than expected. Annual operating plans, strategy presentations, and market studies — all work as elementary items of your faintly visible end goal. The bigger fish that needs to be fried is the execution — this is what makes or breaks the deal.
Executing a laid-out plan that looks doable and requires testing is almost like flying an aircraft in tough weather. The pilot does have support from the navigation team and the access to real-time route conditions, but the final decision to tic tac toe depends on the pilot’s “method” of executing that trip.
One may come across a number of models or methods of execution, the most noteworthy being simply two: push or pull. The core difference between the two is how you manage your human resources. People are a company’s biggest assets and as the head of — a process, a team or a company — leader’s job is to manage people the right way. The way of management is dependent on the industry and type of product or service, but at the end it’s a leader’s “method” that enables success.
Helmed by core values such as innovation, agility, ownership, honesty in the company’s culture, a leader must choose the “right path” to people management. The lucrative use of people’s abilities and strengths greatly influences an organization’s culture, the decision flow and the very innovative cycle in a specific business and its product or service journey. A misfit obviously doesn’t work — given the intangible loss of reputation that companies have to incur besides their previous money and time.
Reflecting on personal experiences, I advocate for the pull method of management. Pull facilitates decentralized decision-making, fostering the emergence of multiple leaders within the system — a potent byproduct. When one achieves targets with people and not through people, the guards come down — exposing the organization to network effects that enables talent acquisition, innovation and customer centricity.
