Where are the Leaders? Where are the Managers?
Feb 14, 2022
John Kotter considered once again the issue of management vs. leadership. Kotter is a well-known and well-regarded Harvard business researcher in this area and for his work on leading change.
The interview reminded me once again that the confusion around these two terms is massive, and that misunderstanding gets in the way of any reasonable discussion about how to build an organization to lead, position it for success and “win” in the twenty-first century.
The Big Three (Mistakes) When it Comes to Leadership vs Management:
According to Kotter, the mistakes people make on the issue are threefold:
Mistake #1: People use the terms "management" and "leadership" interchangeably. This shows that they don't see the crucial difference between the two and the vital functions that each role plays.
Mistake #2: People use the term "leadership" to refer to the people at the very top of hierarchies. They then call the people in the layers below them in the organization "management." And then all the rest are workers, specialists, and individual contributors. This is also a mistake and very misleading.
Mistake #3: People often think of "leadership" in terms of personality characteristics, usually as something they call charisma. Since few people have great charisma, this leads logically to the conclusion that few people can provide leadership, which gets us into increasing trouble.
"Management is a Set of Well-Known Processes"
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, he goes on, “in fact, management is a set of well-known processes, like planning, budgeting, structuring jobs, staffing jobs, measuring performance and problem-solving, which help an organization to predictably do what it knows how to do well. Management helps you to produce products and services as you have promised, of consistent quality, on budget, day after day, week after week. In organizations of any size and complexity, this is an enormously difficult task. We constantly underestimate how complex this task really is, especially if we are not in senior management jobs. So, management is crucial — but it's not leadership.
Leadership is Entirely Different
It is associated with taking an organization into the future, finding opportunities that are coming at it faster and faster, and successfully exploiting those opportunities.
Leadership is about vision, about people buying in, about empowerment, and, most of all, about producing useful change. Leadership is not about attributes, it's about behavior. And in an ever-faster-moving world, leadership is increasingly needed from more and more people, no matter where they are in a hierarchy. The notion that a few extraordinary people at the top can provide all the leadership needed today is ridiculous, and it's a recipe for failure.”
Some organizations in my experience are over-managed and under-led. Others have a historic management deficit. Without appropriate assessment of these differences and issues we cannot reasonably design management and leadership development programs or for that matter plan for and develop teams or succession.
In a world of unknown futures, we need more leaders throughout the organization. We need mid-level managers who can lead their branch or department to align with overall goals, through vision, influence, and modeling.
Thinking that managers should not be leaders is foolhardy and part of the reason for so many poor implementation efforts.
What are your main “pain points” dealing with leadership in your organization?
What advice would be most helpful to you? And we always assume that you are asking for a friend!
Get in touch. We’ll address your questions and concerns in an upcoming blog post.
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