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.MORAL Do not trust your first impressions of people from other cultures.Public and private roles affecthow people act, and if you are unaware of what their roles entail, you may come to faulty conclusions.Leaders and ManagersWhy has the word leader become more popular than manager? I was discussing this with an accountant onthe verge of retirement, and he remarked rather sourly that it was simply a matter of fashion, adding that theonly people he knew more susceptible to fashion than teenagers were executive managers.However,detecting more than a note of cynicism in his reply, I turned to my dictionary where I discovered that a leaderis  a person who rules, guides, or inspires others, whereas a manager is  a person who directs or managesan organization. You have to admit it: Most of us would like to guide and inspire others.However, directing iswhat police officers do after traffic accidents, and  managing an organization, though impressive, also soundsboring.Frankly, a manager isn t half as sexy as a leader.The change in terminology reflects a shift in organizational structure in many multinational corporations.In the1990s there was a movement in the U.S., Scandinavia, and to a certain extent in the U.K.toward flatter moredecentralized organizations.As employees were split into small teams, the priority was that the team sobjectives were met, not whether it said  manager on your business card.Staffs were told that apreoccupation with status was old-fashioned, and that working on short-term projects where everyone was ateam player would enable them to work more efficiently.Hierarchical became a term of abuse for anorganization, and hierarchies were seen as a threat to all the creativity that a more democratic organizationwould unleash.These smaller units had leaders rather than managers, and their role was to serve the teamand to make it possible for it to achieve its goals.Suddenly, there were no project managers, only projectleaders.But in the rest of the world, companies saw hierarchical organizations as having advantages when it came tospeed of decision-making, continuity, and clear chains of command and communications.And the egalitarianDanes soon realized that the word manager on their business cards was still an important door opener whenthey went abroad, not least to France, Mexico, or Japan.Indeed, once there they would be asked detailedquestions about how many subordinates they had, which made the poor Danes blush with embarrassment.Totheir egalitarian, democratic way of thinking, they had coworkers, and the word subordinates, implying that insome way some people were  above others, shocked them.In many cultures it is possible to judge the authority a person wields by the number of people  under him orher, and not appreciating this fact can lead to problems.Asked at a meeting how many subordinates he had,an Icelandic manager in a group of French and Spanish managers answered truthfully that he didn t have any,and was promptly ignored by the rest of the group.However, when decisions had to be made, he was the onlyone who had the authority to make independent decisions.I also know of a case in Norway of a top managerworking with business development who didn t have any subordinates and was forced to  steal employeesfrom a department in order to get his French colleagues to listen to him.The  kidnapped employees didn tmove location and their duties remained the same, but the department number on their business cardschanged.Of course, you cannot expect consensus about what makes a good leader or a good manager.In the U.S., forexample, business leaders should be charismatic, high-profile go-getters.In some South American countries,in more traditional companies, managers may be where they are by virtue of belonging to the right family, andtheir management style is often autocratic.However, if the role of the patriarchal manager brings with itunquestioned power and authority, it also brings with it a personal responsibility to employees that gives theirwell-being, and the well-being of their families, a higher priority than, say, the next year s budget estimatesbeing delivered on schedule.I once asked a group of employees of different nationalities to priori-tize a list of qualities they valued in theirmangers. The ability to motivate and  the ability to delegate appeared near the top of most lists, but thechoice of one Polish participant surprised me [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]