Whether leaders or employees matter more

How combinations of weak and strong managers and weak and strong employees compare.

Follow @ITCatalysts Dear Bob ...

A comment on the question of which is more important, leaders or staff:

Nobody really doubts that both management and workers are both important to a successful enterprise, just as it is pretty clear that in most sports (perhaps not golf), both natural gifts and rigorous training are necessary.

The question, however, is which is "most" important.

Let's say you could perform the following experiment: You have two groups of employees, one set exceptionally skilled, and the other mediocre, and you have two management teams, one very skilled, and the other inept. Now, let's imagine you could try out the different possibilities in real life.

No one doubts that pairing excellent management and workers will blow away the inept versions of both, as well as outperforming the other two combinations. But what would happen in the marketplace if you could compare the combinations of excellent management with poor workers and vice-versa?

Although my tendency is to favor the excellent worker/poor management combination, I could foresee people arguing that you might get different answers in different industries and/or at different points in the maturation cycle of an industry.

Of course, we can't perform these experiments for real. The best we can do is to look for similar companies, in similar industries, and compare results. This is one way to get a new business book published, e.g. Good to Great.

- Posing a challenge

Dear Posing ...

Actually, you could perform the experiment, using what scientists call "statistical controls." You'd find a bunch of companies, score each on employee and management ability, track results, and perform an analysis of variance to figure out the impact of each factor.

Here's what I'd expect you'd find: