The Real Work of Leadership
The Team Leader’s Guide to Leadership and Management
Professor Suzy Welch argues that the simplistic divide between leaders and managers is misleading; successful teams require a "lanager," who combines visionary leadership with practical management, as she explains in her video lesson on fostering team success.
Balancing Your Approach to Running a Team
Professor Suzy Welch introduces "lanaging," the art of balancing leadership and management by blending inspiration with execution, enabling leaders to build trust, drive results, and effectively communicate between teams and senior leadership.
Making Culture the Fabric of How You Do Work
In this video lesson, Professor Suzy Welch outlines a five-step framework for leaders to intentionally cultivate organizational culture by aligning values with actions, ensuring clear communication, modeling behaviors, celebrating adherence, and enforcing standards to create a cohesive workplace.
Avoiding One-Size-Fits-All Employee Management
Professor Suzy Welch emphasizes the importance of recognizing and supporting star employees to prevent resignations, while also addressing the challenges posed by different employee types—The Departed, The Headache, and The Heartache—to foster team success and maintain respect.
How Not to Go Wrong with Hiring
In her video lesson, Professor Suzy Welch outlines a structured hiring approach to combat biases and improve candidate assessment by identifying common pitfalls, such as Nice Guy and Fangirl Syndromes, while recommending practices like collaborative decision-making and focused questioning.
The 4 Cardinal Rules of Firing
Jim Peters emphasizes that firing should never be easy, as it requires care and empathy; Professor Suzy Welch outlines key strategies for ethical terminations, including addressing performance issues early, preserving dignity, offering support for future steps, and providing a fair severance package.
Systematic Strategies for Making Hard Calls
Peter Drucker's insight emphasizes that successful businesses stem from courageous decisions, and Professor Suzy Welch's lesson introduces frameworks like the 10-10-10 system and decision trees to help leaders navigate uncertainty and make impactful choices confidently.
Handling the 5 Hard Truths of Crisis Management
In a crisis, leaders must pause to acknowledge five hard truths—about the severity of the situation, the inevitability of secrets surfacing, the potential for negative portrayals, the likelihood of accountability, and the opportunity for organizational improvement—to develop resilient strategies for effective management.
Managers often get a bad rap, dismissed as bureaucratic cogs while leaders are celebrated as bold visionaries. Yet both roles are essential to making an organization function effectively. So why does this unbalanced narrative persist? Suzy Welch argues it comes from an overemphasis on separating leadership and management, rather than recognizing how they intersect. The most effective team leaders, she notes, break through this false divide — knowing when to inspire broadly and when to dig into the details. The blend is so crucial, Welch even coined a term for it: “lanaging.”
Learning Objectives
- Be beloved by both your team and your bosses.
- Bring organizational values to life in daily work.
- Adapt your management style to diverse employee needs.
- Improve hiring and handle terminations with care.
- Make tough calls and handle crises with confidence.