Lead Better, Manage Better: 22 Ways Wide-Format Print Pros Can Do Both

ASK ANY RANDOM group of people to name an inspiring leader from history and the usual names will likely come tumbling forward: Alexander the Great, Elizabeth I, Napoleon, Washington, Lincoln, Shackleton, Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr. — figures who responded to a crisis, unified their nation or “tribe,” and changed the course of history through a combination of will, charisma, and daring.

Ask for great managers of history — the individuals who helped translate vision into action — and the names are likely to come a little slower: Alexander Hamilton … Lord Beaverbrook … George C. Marshall … umm … Tim Cook? None of this should be surprising. Managers work behind the scenes. They prefer evolution over revolution, focus on execution of a plan over articulating a vision, and perhaps most importantly, the best ones work to make other people look and be better.

Much of the distinction between leaders and managers comes from the source of their power. Managers are given authority over others. Leaders are voluntarily followed by others. Or as the axiom goes: “Managers require, leaders inspire.”

The other key distinction is that a leader provides clarity of purpose, outlines the big picture, and leverages this vision to guide their teams. They identify the universal and capitalize on it. In contrast, good managers zero in on what is unique about each of their workers — their individual strengths — and capitalize on those.

Clearly, a great enterprise — be it of a political or business nature — needs both: the dream AND the day-to-day execution. Nation states and corporations have the resources and scale to support a leader and managers, but when your life’s work is a small business, you must wear BOTH hats. And that’s where it gets tricky: not just knowing when a situation requires leadership or management but also acquiring the competencies to do so.

Management is a set of skills that just about anyone can learn with sufficient emotional and raw intelligence. Leadership appears to be at least partly innate: it necessitates certain mysterious magnetic traits that are harder to acquire if you’re not born with them … an “X factor.” Still, while you may never develop the oratory skills of Churchill, the charisma of Kennedy, the lead-from-the-front courage of Patton, the humor of Branson, or the ability to launch a new product with the confidence of Steve Jobs, you can do a lot that is vitally important to the success of your business: set the mission, lay the ethical foundation, model the behaviors you want to see, make the bold strategic calls when needed, and show your workers and clients they are cared for.

In *Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader,* London School of Business professor Herminia Ibarra argues that for all the theory about what makes a good leader, the only way to develop as one is to first act — to plunge yourself into new projects, interact with very different kinds of people, and experiment with unfamiliar ways of getting things done. In short, to act your way into thinking like a leader. In the following pages, we share tips from your peers, industry coaches, and management experts — some for leaders, some for managers. What they all have in common is that they’re actionable … and waiting for you to roll them out on the production floor.

PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

LEADER

Look the Part

Sgt. Matt Eversmann took part in one of the U.S. military’s great “no man left behind” stories, leading troops in the firefight in Mogadishu, Somalia, that served as the inspiration for *Black Hawk Down.* So what’s his take on leadership? Fearlessness, charisma, self-sacrifice? No — it’s looking sharp, he tells Carmine Gallo, author of *10 Simple Secrets of the World’s Greatest Communicators.* To start with, “always dress a little better than everyone else,” he advises, especially your subordinates. “Presence” makes people receptive to the important stuff that follows, he argues.

MANAGER

Always Be Monitoring

“The greatest influence in the world is the influence of norms,” adds Joseph Grenny. “When people see visual models of desirable behavior, and when that behavior becomes widespread, it also becomes self-sustaining.” However, few people understand that norms change one person at a time. When someone offers a living example of behavior that solves a problem, others can be powerfully influenced by that one person. “When we coach executives to inspire others, we tell them to find that one positive example — a person, a team, a unit that went the extra mile to help a customer, to help out a fellow employee, meet a particularly high standard — and make it evident these are your expectations and let it sink into the collective conscience of the entire organization,” says Grenny. In a print business, that might mean spotlighting the press operator who stayed late to fix a client’s job or the designer who solved a color-match crisis. Recognize and publicize those wins — they quietly set the cultural bar for everyone else.

PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

LEADER

Fake It Till You Make It

Traditionally, “gravitas” — that trait that seems to attach itself to all great leaders — has been boiled down to three attributes: confidence, decisiveness, and a clear vision. The first is probably the most important in getting people to follow you, even if it’s not a great indicator of competence. (According to some studies, the probability of the most confident person in the room also being the most competent is a paltry 15 percent better than chance.) Nevertheless, it remains the most widely used proxy of the right to lead. Stride into a meeting and just repeat your point the most insistently, and you’ve a good chance of carrying the day. If that all sounds a little inauthentic, that’s fine, says Ibarra. “Think of leadership development as trying on possible selves,” she says. “It’s OK to be inconsistent from one day to the next. That’s not being a fake; it’s how we experiment to figure out what’s right for the new challenges and circumstances we face.”

PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

MANAGER

Know the Value of Your Time

It sounds obvious, but the more senior the worker, the deeper the work they do should be. And yet shallow and reactive work seems to always beckon. The secret to getting out of this trap, says David Brown of the Edge Retail Academy, is to attach a value to your time and use this to guide your decisions. If, for example, your revenue target is $1.5 million a year, then divide this number by 2,250 (assuming that you’ll be working 45 hours a week, 50 weeks a year). Now you know the only way to reach your sales target is if you’re involved in activities and decisions that generate $670 in revenue per hour for the business. That figure alone should make you drop the heat-press handle and call your neighbor’s kid to see if he wants to make some extra money cleaning windows. Do a daily tracking report of all your activities in 30-minute increments for several weeks — there are apps that make this easy — and you’ll see what’s sucking up your work hours. You may find that more than 50 percent of your time is being consumed by trivial or “busy” work. Lastly, prioritize what’s important and start delegating a few tasks each month. If you’re the one everyone depends on for color profiles or RIP settings, your business loses value when you retire. The key to leadership is realizing it’s about building an effective team.

LEADER

But Not Overconfident

According to Stanford business professor Bob Sutton, the best leaders have “the attitude of wisdom” — the confidence to act on their convictions and the humility to keep searching for evidence that they are wrong. Yes, you need to carry yourself in a way that shows you are in charge, but it’s vital to couple that strength with a humbleness that ensures you realize you will often be wrong and which encourages people to suggest alternative ways of doing things. In any small business, humility starts with inviting feedback from employees, clients, and vendors. When people see you listening and adjusting course, they feel safe bringing you the truth before small problems become big ones.

PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

MANAGER

Fire the Bottom 10 Percent

An employee should never be surprised to learn they are being fired. If their first response is “Why me?” the fault lies with poor management, writes former GM CEO Jack Welch in *The Real Life MBA,* explaining that it was obviously never made clear to the individual that they weren’t measuring up. “You tell the bottom 10 percent where they stand, and if they don’t improve, you tell them to go. You want to field the best team; the only way you’re going to do it is by having the best players.” That may sound harsh, but for small shops it’s survival math — every weak link slows the press run, drains morale, and burns time you can’t invoice.

LEADER

From the Front

As they say, culture eats strategy for breakfast — and culture starts at the top. You’re the leader. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” The same holds true for print business owners: your team takes its cues from you. When you show up early, stay curious, and admit mistakes, that tone ripples through production, customer service, and creative. Set expectations not with memos but with example — and keep raising the bar. If you prefer to take your inspiration from the hard-edged world of business, consider Tom Peters’ recommendation: “Give a lot, expect a lot, and if you don’t get it, prune.” Each part of this advice — setting standards, communicating them, and building systems to support them — requires conscious effort on the part of a leader: you.

PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

MANAGER

Firewall Your Bad Moods

The late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen once argued that managers have among the most important jobs in the world. How they treat their workers during the day will determine whether billions of people go home happy or agitated at the end of the day. Consider managing your moods as one of your chief responsibilities. You are a “walking mood inductor,” and your subordinates are “receptors.” Your mood impacts how they feel and, consequently, how they perform. Charles M. Schwab said he considered his ability to arouse enthusiasm among his workers the greatest asset he possessed. “And the way to develop the best that is in a man is by appreciation and encouragement,” he once said. In a fast-paced production environment, your crew mirrors you — panic breeds panic, calm breeds competence. Before stepping onto the floor, take a breath and choose the mood you want the team to catch.

LEADER

It’s About Values, Stupid

A chronic poor performer is a clear impediment to the goals you’ve set. “When you ask a group to deliver high performance, you are inviting them to a place of stress, one where they must stretch to achieve goals. If you shrink from or delay in addressing the issue of a poorly performing team member, you don’t lose just that person’s contribution. You send a message to everyone else about your values,” says Joseph Grenny, author of *Crucial Accountability.* People want to work for a company that has high standards, that they can be proud of, and that is going to bring out the best in them. Don’t disappoint them.

PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

MANAGER

Leverage Strengths

Top managers know their people as well as they know their printers. According to Marcus Buckingham, author of *The One Thing You Need to Know … About Great Managing, Great Leading and Sustained Individual Success,* the key attribute of top managers is that they are extremely adept at identifying their employees’ individual strengths and capitalizing on them. Apart from the natural productivity boost of getting people to do what they are good at, there are a host of other benefits — these employees are better motivated, need less supervision, and stay longer. It helps to know what triggers people and fires them up — extrinsic motivators like money, or something more intrinsic, like participation in a team or the satisfaction of mastering a skill — and to merge their goals with yours: more sales, greater job satisfaction, feeling appreciated. This approach is far more effective than trying to improve people’s weak points — an uphill battle that yields sub-optimal returns.

LEADER

Schedule Down Time

The legendary cognitive psychologist Amos Tversky once quipped, “You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” And no one does that apply to more than a company leader. You need the time and space for reflection and the assimilation of lessons learned from experience. It was something the late statesman George Shultz appreciated. Once a week, he would shut the door of his office and sit by himself with only a pen and a piece of paper and let his mind wander. According to *The New York Times,* he would think strategically and conceptually, setting his sights forward in a way that he couldn’t in the day-to-day crush of his responsibilities. In a print business, that kind of quiet time is rare — but crucial. Step away from the presses and screens long enough to ask: what’s next? Which clients or technologies deserve more focus? Schedule it, protect it, and treat it as sacred.

MANAGER

Communicate Better

Think you’re an effective communicator? Chances are you’re not. According to an Interact/Harris Poll, 91 percent of employees say their bosses don’t communicate well — whether explaining what they wanted done, where someone went wrong, or even what the employee had done right. The study’s author, Interact CEO Lou Solomon, told the *Harvard Business Review* that leaders and managers could do better by offering specific praise and recognition, giving personal and public thank-yous, sharing information, and showing their humanity. In short: tell people what’s working, not just what’s broken. Praise publicly, correct privately, and don’t assume your instructions were understood — clarity is kindness.

PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

LEADER

Be Decisive

Among the virtues traditionally considered “leaderly” — courage, integrity, sociability, compassion — decisiveness ranks high. “Be willing to make decisions. That’s the most important quality in a good leader,” says business author and ad man Roy Williams. “Avoid the ‘Ready-aim-aim-aim-aim’ syndrome. You must be willing to fire.” Indeed, that is one of the things that distinguishes a leader from a manager. “Managers say, ‘Ready, Aim, Fire.’ Leaders say, ‘Ready, Fire, Aim.’” Williams calls it “finding your range.”

LEADER

Keep Your Powder Dry

While being willing to pull the trigger is important, it’s equally crucial to appreciate you only have so much ammunition in the form of financial capital, energy, and focus. The hardest thing about being a leader is saying no to good ideas, especially in small business, where it’s imperative your customers know what you stand for. As Steve Jobs, who famously told former Nike CEO Mark Parker to stop making so much “crap” and just focus on the products people lust after, put it: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”

MANAGER

Meet One-on-One

Most employees and managers cringe at the idea of more meetings, but instituting weekly one-on-one meetings with all staff can be the most important step a business owner can take to get the best out of staff and retain top performers. That was the result of an intensive data-driven survey conducted by Google of its own, already highly motivated workforce, according to *The New York Times.* For print shops, these short check-ins prevent bottlenecks before they jam production. A 15-minute Monday chat beats a two-hour emergency huddle later in the week.

MANAGER

Listen

Author Tom Peters says listening is “the bedrock of leadership excellence,” but characterizes himself as a bad listener and “a serial interrupter.” To help himself stay focused, he writes the word “LISTEN” on the palm of his hand before walking into meetings. “The focus must be on what the other person is saying, not on formulating your response,” he says. “That kind of listening shows respect for the other person, and they notice it.” In client-heavy industries like print, listening can save both jobs and relationships. Most customer complaints aren’t about mistakes — they’re about feeling unheard.

LEADER

Trust Your Curiosity

After spending more than 10,000 hours coaching senior executives and their teams, Allan Milham concluded that genuine curiosity is what separates great leaders from the rest. In his book *Out of the Question: How Curious Leaders Win,* he argues that the best leaders constantly want to learn, explore, and innovate. In print and design, curiosity fuels evolution — new substrates, new inks, new markets. The most successful shop owners don’t just ask, “What’s everyone else doing?” They ask, “What’s something nobody’s tried yet?”

MANAGER

Say It Over and Over and …

Dictators aren’t usually the sorts of leaders you want to emulate, but in this instance, Stalin had it right when he supposedly said, “Quantity has a quality all its own.” That applies not just to steelmaking or military strength but to communicating with employees. According to Patrick Lencioni, a former Bain & Co. consultant and author of *The Five Dysfunctions of a Team,* while you may feel you’re being redundant and even annoying, “studies show employees won’t believe a leader’s message until they’ve heard it seven times.” So keep repeating your vision — about quality, deadlines, service — until you can’t stand hearing it anymore. That’s about the time your team finally starts believing it.

PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

LEADER

Embrace Failure

Warren Bennis, one of the pioneers of leadership studies (and an advisor to both Reagan and Kennedy), had a failure epiphany that changed his life. “The leaders I met, whatever walk of life they were from, always referred back to some failure: something that happened to them that was personally difficult, even traumatic, something that made them feel that desperate sense of hitting bottom — as something they thought was almost a necessity. It’s as if, at that moment, the iron entered their soul; that moment created the resilience that leaders need.” The lesson: don’t fear failure — embrace it. Here’s how to do it right:

• Fail cheaply. Always ask, “What is the minimum viable experiment?”
•  Fail forward. Be sure to learn something you didn’t know before you failed.
•  Fail quickly. The primary goal is to prove or disprove your concept.

PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

MANAGER

Coach the Coach

With the Internet now delivering much of the technical and pricing information clients once relied on staff to explain, the dynamics of the sales counter or showroom have changed. Selling and people skills are at a premium, which means there is a greater responsibility for sales managers to provide coaching, says Wharton faculty member Linda Richardson. Her studies show big payoffs when sales managers upgrade their coaching (not selling) skills. “If you can’t afford a training course, do e-learning, or buy books,” she says. “Even the smallest companies can and should develop their sales managers.” In a print shop, that coaching might mean teaching account reps how to upsell substrates or how to translate vague client ideas into production-ready art.

MANAGER

Hire Well

Each of the 217 times David Ogilvy opened a new office for advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, he left a set of Russian nesting dolls on the desk of the incoming manager. On reaching the tiniest doll, the manager would find a note: “If each of us hires people smaller than ourselves, we shall become a company of midgets, but if each of us hires people bigger than ourselves, we shall become a company of giants.” In *Good to Great,* Jim Collins identified hiring as one of the key elements of superior “Level 5 Leadership.” Over-invest in hiring — your next great hire could free you from late-night color corrections or spark your next profit center.

LEADER

When Good Practices Turn Bad

As Ibarra said earlier, consider everything you’ve read here something to “try on.” Even the best management practices can lead to problems if left in place too long, note Yves Doz and Mikko Kosonen in *Fast Strategy.*

• Forging a clear vision — can result in tunnel vision.
• Honing business processes — can create inflexible systems that can’t adapt to new challenges.
• Building deep customer relationships — can inhibit experiments.
•  Choosing proven leaders for projects — can breed overconfidence and resistance to new ideas.
• Teambuilding — can lead to silos and a lack of cooperation.

The answer? Shake it up. Assign staff to work in an area outside their usual competence, set mock constraints such as a small budget ahead of a marketing strategy meeting, or set fuzzy goals. The common theme: keep testing and evolving. Even in print, the market changes faster than your workflow. Experiment small, learn fast, repeat.