From my experience all of these things mean nearly the same thing; though I do separate them into two categories, as defined below. This is about the style of the person, not the job role itself. Somebody called a “Team Leader” can be a manager the same as someone who is a “Department Manager” could be a leader. Someone could also be both, potentially.

Manager: A manager always has a specific job to do and a bunch of items to manage. Managers tend to be more based on measurable metrics or deliverables and have “business” requirements to meet. Managers are often very effective in short term situations, but not always in achieving long term, sustainable results.

Managers use words like “goal”, “deadline”, “longevity” and “process”

Leader: A leader deals with people, not objectives. The general opinion of a leader is that the person is more important – because happy people achieve greater things. Dealing with a situation, not it’s symptoms. Leaders may not always achieve the best results short term, but are definitely more suited to long term ambitions.

Leaders use words like “achievements” and “motivation” and “loyalty” as well as emotive words such as “passion” and “faith”

I’m not a manager, I manage things I have to. But I am a leader. This means that I am somewhat bias. I value the power of people above the power of anything else. The reason my projects tend to work successfully, in my opinion, is that being a leader everything I do runs with passion; I look for passionate people to work with, who have faith in the cause, whatever that may be.

I believe leadership is more successful than management, and I shall tell you why.

Leadership inspires people. Leaders believe that inspiring and motivating, putting people into positions they love and creating emotional bonds inspires the best results, I agree for a number of reasons. You may think this is all very wishy washy, but I have supporting evidence.

Samurai: some of the most skilled people ever to exist, total and utter dedication; prepared to make any appropriate sacrifice to achieve their goals. Had total faith and loyalty to their cause, it inspired them to be the best they could be.

Winston Churchill, David Beckham and dare I say it, Adolf Hitler: bare with me on this. Winston Churchill lead a country through some of the hardest times it’s ever seen and won us a war against a much more advanced enemy. David Beckham inspires people and becomes a role model for children and athletes world wide. Adolf Hitler made people do unspeakably evil things and believe they were genuinely working for the good of the world; an evil person with horrific goals but a clever leader who knew how to inspire his followers.

Jeff – team leader: achieves business goals by ensuring production rates of maintained. Offers no positive incentives, uses words like “team” without reason and does nothing to inspire the team. Goals are achieved, but staff turnover is as soon as possible due to a lack of inspiration or motivation. Jeff is based on a real person who I worked with a few years back, but to save that person being “named and shamed” I shan’t mention their name.

I am not for one minute saying the workplace should become a hippy fest of people singing kumbaya wearing flowers in their hair. But stop to think about why you’re doing things, speculation leads to accumulation – and an effective team of people can achieve almost anything – if they want to. Loving the product is always the first step.

Bare it in mind next time you’re making a managerial decision. Oh, and for the record, there have been hundreds of famous leaders. Ironically, no famous managers. Which do you think is the most effective?

As most of you know I do like to dabble somewhat in User Experience design. A very wise man once informed me that UX can be used as a “dark art” to deliberately trick the user into making certain decisions or unwittingly signing themselves up for something and so on. For the record Dark Patterns does a brilliant job at naming and shaming these websites.

Following this, and reading an article about Customer Experience (as opposed to just website UX), it lead me to start thinking about a core market – or more specifically the core set of customers who promote and build a brand – consciously or otherwise.

Especially in the car scene I have noticed lots of brands come and go, from tuning garages to communities, forums and clubs. And something I have noticed is that the ones who tend to stay are the ones who focus on the people who put them where they are – their core user group, whether these are club members or regular customers. Remembering these people is often the key to success. These people are the ones who will support you when it’s raining, not just when it’s sunny. Unfortunately for everybody involved fair weather support is exactly that, fair weather support. And if you insist on keeping those people happy above your core group you will unwittingly weaken your position the moment things aren’t as hunky dory as you would like them to be, so here are some quick guides to ensuring you keep your consumer base happy.

1. Don’t change! This is an important one. You will gain popularity for being who and what you are; don’t change that. Your brand/group/company needs to maintain a consistent stance in order to keep your consumers. The moment you change this you lose the people who made you popular in the first place.
2. Keep your vision clear decide on what you want to achieve, decide how you are going to achieve it and set out to do it, keep your plans dynamic but the core concepts identical
3. Take advice, listen and learn something which I am guilty of falling short on in the past. Human nature allows us to give advice much easier than receiving it. But it is important to ensure that you are also listening to your consumers; keep them happy above everybody else, within reason.
4. Stick to your guns; appearing weak once ruins any work you had done towards a strong image. You have your principles and your ethics, stick to them – they’re the only things you should never change for anybody.
5. To be respected you must respect yourself, such a cliché but it is very true. Before anybody will respect you or your brand you must first respect it. You are who you are, you do what you do and your reputation is what it is, people who want to do business with you should respect that – but why would they, if you don’t?

5 quick tips, I hope you liked them.

Good morning all,

So I’ve been listening to various people talking about various things over the past few weeks, and after accepting a new job I have been pondering why some people have more luck than others in finding the success they seek. This is quite a philosophical thought of mine, to be honest, and one which I thought I would share with you. It may seem a bit wishy washy and you may think I’m chatting absolute horse manure, but it’s up to you, I would love to hear what you have to say about it too, so the comments are, of course, open.

It has occurred to me that the laws of attraction mean that somebody who is rich attracts more money, someone who is popular attracts more attention and so on. Surely this leads to the fair assumption that someone who is successful attracts more success? I believe this to be the case; so the real question is, can you trick the law of attraction into treating you as if you are successful? Doing so would, theoretically, vastly increase your chances of success? Positivity breeds more positivity, it is an upwards spiral which is difficult to get on, but once you’re on it surely you’re set – as long as you keep it up?

Regardless of your measurable (metric) success, surely your success is shown to others by the way in which you present yourself, after all we don’t walk around with a photo of our home, car and most recent bank statement stapled to our faces. So, if we can act as if we are already successful, rather than trying to gain such a status, people will treat as accordingly.

This brings me to the point of my post. Success is not a metric, success is a mindset. If you believe you are successful, who is to tell you otherwise? Self belief and self appreciation is the first step to self fulfilment. I’m not usually a massive philosopher, but this makes sense. If I believe in myself I subconsciously lead others to believe in me too, if I believe myself to be successful I automatically lead others to believe I am to, and treat me as such.

Just some food for thought

Ladies and gentlemen,

After spending ages knowing that I should be involved in all this blogging business I have finally gone and set myself up a simple WordPress blog. I know, I know, I should’ve done it sooner and all of the rest of it, I’ve got no excuse other than being busy; but any way, the blog is here now, so quit yo’ wingin’ fool

I intend on this blog being basically my venting ground for everything that comes to my mind, from random thoughts to my knowledge and experience in leadership and project management up to my web design/development stuff, how I’m getting on with Relentless Racing and the car scene – my new job at Speed, where I will be starting as their Digital Manager on the 8th of next month after a lovely break away with my gorgeous Lady Fliss and anything else that comes to my mind really.

I have lots of thoughts and experiences and I figure somebody out there may benefit from me actually putting them onto paper, metaphorically speaking, so here they are, starting tonight.

I promise I’ll try to contribute to this blog frequently, but I don’t promise that my posts will always be well proof read or profound, sometimes they might be utter crap, but that’s the way the muffin crumbles…

I realise being a web designer my blog should have some kind of amazeballs awesome design, but unfortunately all of my other projects seem to push things like this to a back seat, making a blog post is a 5 minute job, designing a whole blog is a good amount of hours which I can rarely spare, so sorry for the lacklustre design!