To say that leadership and management are fundamentally different is one of those statements that is both entirely true and woefully inadequate. Academics delight in delineating the differences to make the not so subtle point that one can be skilled at management but fall terribly short at leading others. Reading about this difference you might conclude that it is still a hot topic, worthy of debate 40+ years after John Kotter told us all we need to know.
Professor Kotter periodically reminds us management creates order through process, whereas leadership creates change through vision. Managers create deadlines, while leaders create strategy. Managers apply rules. Leaders motivate. This is mostly right.
Let me offer a simple analogy to draw a line between these two ideas. Leadership is like playing baseball, while management is like playing shortstop. One is bigger than the other, not just in action but also in thinking. A leader can’t really manage effectively if they don’t connect their daily activities back to leadership––either theirs or someone else’s. Without a tether to values, vision, strategy and long-range goals, management becomes an isolated activity without a center, without purpose. But being a strong leader doesn’t equate to being a sound manager any more than knowing baseball allows you to excel at shortstop. A leader may make quality decisions but without the ability to get others to execute those decisions, those decisions really don’t matter. What confounds this even further is that any action can reflect either leadership or management.
Is giving feedback a management or a leadership skill? The answer: It all depends on how it gets done. When any action is grounded in values, it becomes a matter of leadership. Leadership is inherently big picture (think relationships, not just strategy) and value driven. Feedback can carry deep and important messages about relationships (I have confidence that you can do this) or it can be offered as a judgment about performance to correct an error (shorten your presentation and make it punchy). This is the real difference between leadership and management. They are not unique activities. They are unique expressions of the same activity.
Think about the classic pursuit of “time management.” If you read what is written about time management, you quickly discern it is all about efficiency and the capacity to do more. Save time by doing this. Expand time by doing that. Time leadership, on the other hand, if there were such a description (and there should be) is about setting the right priorities and goals to begin with. This is a value play, as doing so requires choices of what matters most. Time can be a leadership or a management act. Your choice.
This is not to say we need more leadership and less management. But it is to say leadership needs to come first. Managers who don’t see the big picture or recognize the messages they send about relationships fail to do something important and fail to hold people accountable to what matters. The problem is this: It is too easy to teach management skills without a connection to leadership, and far too many do. When we focus exclusively on management, we hit singles, not homeruns.
Shortstops don’t think much about game strategy or pitching. And we all know pitching wins ball games. It is best to start with leadership.
– RS