Let’s Stop Confusing Leadership with Management
To build a successful company in today’s world, you need more than good managers, you need great leaders too, and to explain why, we must understand the difference between the two roles.
Management is about predicting, controlling, and organising. Without management, business results would be catastrophic. Management focuses on short-to-mid-term challenges and will resolve their problems, but the one constant in business is that nothing stays the same. Companies must be, nimble, able to adjust, and forward-thinking and this is where management must come to an end and leadership starts.
It's not about giving great speeches or being liked or charismatic. It's about delivering medium term results and understanding the future. Part of a leader’s job is to realise a future that's not going to happen by doing what's already in place.
Leadership is about change.
It means envisioning a new future, creating a pathway forward, solving leadership problems and inspiring the workforce.
Although management and leadership often overlap, they require different skill sets. The manager must organise human and material resources and resolve difficult decisions. In addition, they implement operational improvements and assign and monitor tasks. Leadership on the other hand focuses on people, vision, and influence. They should define a compelling future, build relationships, nurture potential and lead transformation and innovation. They should see above the day to day and facilitate the pathway to the new future.
Here’s the problem: in many of today’s companies the leader spends too much time firefighting at management level leaving the manager to ‘supervise’ his/her span of control.
The problems are threefold, first firefighting becomes the norm (spiral of chaos), second strategic planning is weak and thirdly people development is stifled.
What should be done and how do companies fix things There is one single action to start the change that is easy to say, but incredibly difficult to implement. Namely the Leader must delegate management tasks to the manager then get out of the way. The reason it doesn’t happen is because the manager is perceived not ready for the bigger job, and because the Leader is secretly afraid to lead, because it’s out of his/her comfort zone.
The fix is simple in theory, challenging in practice… but critical for future success. If your leaders are still managing, and your managers are just coping, it’s time for a reset – and we’re here to help.
