As part of a Leadership Development programme, I’ll often ask people, ‘are leadership and management the same?’ Usually, people are agreed that they are not the same. When I ask what they see as the difference between leadership and management, it gets very interesting…
I have had the impression recently, that management is falling out of fashion. Or at least, the term has taken on a different meaning. To many people, ‘management’ means micro-management. Younger staff aspire to be leaders but don’t want to be managers.
What???
It’s true, this may just be a reflection of the clients I’ve been working with lately. But it has really made me think again about how I talk about leadership and management.
As ever, I like to define my terms. There is a myriad of definitions of both leadership and management, I picked these as being simple and I agree with them:
“Leadership means the ability to guide, inspire, and influence people to work together to achieve a common goal.”
I like this definition because it highlights the social aspect of leadership. It’s about the impact a leader has on a group of people. It’s also about working towards a common goal – in the absence of a goal, no leader is needed. It’s easy to see why this appeals since influence is fast becoming a major currency of success.
“Management means the process of planning, organising, and directing the resources of an organisation to achieve its goals.”
This definition works for me because it’s all about the resources of an organisation. Those resources may include people, but the term also encompasses time, funds, systems and processes, assets, strategy, data and creativity.
So why would that not appeal?
I wonder whether it just sounds too much like hard work. Good management requires that you keep track of information, you think ahead (and let’s face it, planning really has gone out of fashion!) and make decisions. You are accountable.
In these definitions, Leadership sounds much easier that management, doesn’t it?
In reality, I think it’s much harder to be a good leader that to be a good manager.
What does it take to be a good leader?
Good interpersonal skills are top of my list, closely followed by a commitment to your own development. I often say to clients, ‘if you want to be a better leader then work on yourself’. People will follow your lead if you are whole-hearted – in NLP terms, congruent – in setting out the goal and the path to achieving it. You need clarity about the goal, a means of tracking activity and progress and the very best leaders also have a commitment to developing their people.
What does it take to be a good manager?
I can best sum this up by saying that you need a commitment to quality. A good manager gets the best out of the available resources. (Again, for all my readers who work in tech and other industries that refer to people as ‘resources’, I’m referring to the entire scope of organisational resources)
A good manager has and creates clear goals, targets and performance indicators. A good manager keeps promises, turns up on time, plans in advance, spots opportunities to save time, money or effort. A good manager also communicates well and takes the initiative to achieve their goals. They do a good job of every task.
I see both leadership and management as equally important. I wonder whether management has fallen out of fashion because the L&D profession gravitated towards ‘leadership development’ and dropped ‘management development’ sometime in the late 90s. Instead of running programmes on Time Management, Decision-making, Performance Management and how to run a meeting, we started offering ‘Authentic Leadership’, ‘High Performance Leadership’ and ‘Team Leadership’. It sounds a lot more inviting, doesn’t it?
And yet…
Leadership without management?
We all know senior people like this. Lots of inspiration and motivation, guiding and influencing but when someone isn’t responding to your brand of inspiration, what do you do? Yes, work on your interpersonal skills. But in the meantime?
The leaders who don’t manage are often very well liked but don’t always deliver. Sometimes they fall into the trap of not addressing problems and assuming that people are ‘empowered’ resolve issues, which can then drag on, wasting time and other valuable resources.
The exception is the leader who is senior enough to have people to manage on their behalf. The higher up the organisational structure you climb, the more important it is to have good team members who can manage the people, the finance, the systems and processes and so on, leaving you free to focus on the bigger picture and providing inspiration to everyone.
Management without leadership?
You probably know a few of these too. A manager who doesn’t lead can be successful up to a point. If someone more senior is providing the overall goals and strategy, then the manager’s job is to marshall the people and resources to achieve the goal. It probably involves some systems or structure processes to make sure that the right things are happening at the right time. It still needs a lot of communication, probably less inspiration – just clarity of goals and targets. Sometimes clear methods too.
If I was a senior executive, which would I rather have? Leaders who didn’t manage well of managers who didn’t lead well? It’s a tough question and academic, of course, because the reality is that to succeed in a senior role you have to be able to do both, even if you don’t do both equally well.
What I will say, is that I would be more likely to promote someone to a senior role if I had confidence in their ability to manage.
What would you do?
In conclusion, I will also give this advice to anyone looking to advance in their career. If you haven’t already, learn to manage. Learn to manage time, to manage systems and processes, to manage decision-making. Learn to run a meeting efficiently, make an engaging presentation, to give feedback that will be acted upon. Learn how to do a performance appraisal, to tackle difficult conversations, to accept feedback and learn from it.
In short, if you want to be a better leader, work on yourself and your ability to manage.
