The Psychology of Human Leadership: How To Develop Charisma and Authority by Michael Paschen & Erich Dihsmaier

Author:Michael Paschen & Erich Dihsmaier [Paschen, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published: 2013-07-21T14:00:00+00:00

5.3 Goals and Delegation

In practical leadership, the main dealings with goals are not reflected all that strongly in the annual target agreement process, which we criticized as being a somewhat artificial device in many companies at the start of this chapter. Practical, ongoing hard work with goals is represented much more strongly in the way in which the tasks and challenges of the job are dealt with every day. Generally, when referring to passing on goals and tasks in everyday leadership, we don’t speak of target agreement systems so much as delegation.

In day-to-day work, the way in which goals are dealt with is revealed through delegation.

You could argue that delegation is more concerned with practical measures and tasks than with goals. However, we mustn’t forget that the question of whether you consider something to be a goal or a task (or measure) in a company ultimately only depends on whether you are looking at things from above or from below.

From the perspective of the investors, a 10 % growth in sales is a goal. The management board derives a strategy from this that requires expansion to China. From the perspective of the management board, setting up an economically successful division in China is a goal. From the perspective of the investors, however, this is a measure for achieving the profit goals. The management board may then give the company’s HR director the goal of developing an expatriate program for China. From the perspective of the HR director, this is a goal, whereas from the perspective of the management board it is a measure for the goal of economic expansion to China. This process continues if the HR director gives the company lawyer the goal of working out the contractual conditions for an expatriate program in China. From the perspective of the lawyer, we then have a goal, but from the perspective of the HR director it is a measure for achieving his or her own goal.

Whether a project in a company is a goal or a measure depends on the perspective from which you look at it.

Differentiating between a goal and a measure doesn’t really get us any further. When reflecting on practical leadership with goals, we are actually speaking of the daily mechanism of delegation. The annual target agreement meeting is merely a special case of delegation.

Delegation is the classic mechanism in working with goals.

For this reason, we would now like to introduce a delegation model based on the following idea:

People are trained and developed using goals.

Depending on which goals are defined and how these goals are passed on, people are trained to handle these goals in a very particular way. Table 5.1 shows how this mechanism works.

Table 5.1 Mechanism for dealing with goals

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