PMGM7001 Chap.8 Leading Oneself: Self-Awareness and Succession
Leading Oneself: Self-Awareness and Succession
What the session covers
The executive leadership module opens with Leading Oneself. The syllabus lists opportunities and self-awareness, leadership and management, leadership style and modern leadership, and the question of what leaders see externally and internally.
The course overview adds what leadership and self-leadership are.
Leadership, management and self-leadership
A common distinction in the leadership literature separates leadership, which sets direction and drives change, from management, which creates order and reliable execution. Organisations need both.
Self-leadership applies the same distinction to oneself: setting a direction and managing oneself to follow it.
The founder who saw the opportunity
The case follows the founder of SmartHR, a Japanese cloud service for employment paperwork.
After two failed ideas, he built the product from his own experience of benefits paperwork during an illness and his wife's experience of leave forms, and the company became a market leader and one of Japan's few start-ups valued above a billion dollars.
The decision to step down
Rated highly by his employees, the founder nonetheless judged that he had been a great chief executive for a small company and was not even a good one at several hundred people.
He named his consultative style and his discomfort with top-down decisions as reasons, consulted fellow executives, directors and shareholders, and announced his departure in 2021. The case leaves the board to choose between a co-CEO pairing and a sole successor, and between insiders and outsiders in a culture that resists leaders parachuted in from outside.
What this chapter covers
- 01
The four elements of Leading Oneself
- 02
Leadership and management compared
- 03
Self-leadership as the same distinction turned inward
- 04
Opportunity recognition after two failed ideas
- 05
Self-assessment as the company grew
- 06
Leadership style and the scale of the organisation
- 07
Succession options and the founder's role
- 08
Assuring stakeholders through a transition
Worked example · free
Read the fit, not the rating
- 2Separate her performance from her fit with the new job.
- 2Use the founder's self-assessment to identify the risk.
- 2Recommend how she should decide.
Key terms
- Self-leadership
- Setting one's own direction and then managing oneself to follow it, the leadership and management distinction applied to oneself.
- Self-awareness
- An accurate reading of one's own strengths, limits, preferences and fit with the role the organisation now needs.
- Leadership Style
- A leader's characteristic way of deciding and influencing, such as consultative or directive, whose effectiveness depends on the situation.
- Parachute Leader
- An executive brought in from outside and placed suddenly in a key position, which the case says the company's culture did not support.
Leading Oneself: Self-Awareness and Succession FAQ
Why did the founder step down if his employees rated him highly?
Because he judged the job had changed. He felt great as chief executive at up to about two hundred people but not even good at several hundred, and he said his consultative style and fear of unpopular top-down decisions did not suit a company heading for one to two thousand employees.
Does the case say who succeeded the founder?
The case body leaves the decision open. It describes the board weighing a co-CEO pairing of the technology and operations chiefs against a sole chief executive, and insiders against outsiders, so analyse the options rather than an outcome the case does not state.
What is the difference between leadership and management in this session?
Leadership sets direction and drives change, and management creates order and reliable execution. The case shows the founder doing both early on and deciding that the company's next stage needed a kind of leadership at scale that he was not best placed to provide.
Assessment move
Write your own version of the founder's self-assessment for a role you want in five years: what the role will need, what you do well, what you avoid. Paper topic five asks for personal takeaways, and this exercise produces a specific one.
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