Been thinking about leadership and management for a while now. I’ll probably write an article about my perspectives on both later in the future, but the following definitions should suffice:
Leaders use vision and goals to direct change.
Managers use processes and structures to implement change.
They are not mutually exclusive. They are also not mutually inclusive. You can be great at one, terrible at the other. You can also be terrible at both (basically everyone’s boss, right?)
The value of leaders to an organisation in my opinion, is the power of decentralised initiative. Notice how I added decentralised? It means through the organisation from top to bottom. Initiative only at the top is called a cadre Initiative only at the bottom is called anarchy. Definitive leader is permissive and permeating.
Inspiration, commitment, empowerment are all individual outcomes of an organisational structure that allows for initiative at the small team level. A number of articles talk about the value of those outcomes, but for senior management, those mean realistically little to the organisation. They want those outcomes to bubble up into business and strategy impact. that impact, i believe is summed up in initiative.
In a complex, fast paced, challenging environment, reaction time is critical. The problem with most organisations is that they calculate the time it takes for information to propagate from the ground to the decision makers. That’s important. So they put managers in place to put processes and ensure time-to-reporting, forms to fill and post mortems. In the meantime, staff at the point of impact have to propose solutions for management to deliberate and react.
Yet, most organisations don’t try to measure how long it take for the true round trip time, which includes the decision making process and the translation of those decisions down. The outcome is ever quicker reporting, but slow decisions masqueraded behind business complexities (or for some startups, fundraising business)
Strong leadership empowers an environment that allows initiative to happen so as to allow point of impact staff to react responsibly, with trust and appreciation, to maximize response outcomes. Leadership focus on how to build environments that allows this.
Now this is of course an ideal circumstance. Not every company has been built this way. You can’t change a highly processed organisation into a leadership imbued one overnight. Majority of companies will benefit from a strong manager and a weak leader. And probably do poorly motivating an average manager who is a great leader.
Having worked in a rather wide array of organisations, a good manager will get promoted faster than a good leader. That’s a reality because processes stick, but environments evolves. So honestly, a good manager is probably better.
If you are currently looking into a leadership role, you ideally need to be a good processed oriented manager first. Then whether being a good leader is going to benefit you, depends on whether the company is built for decentralised initiative.
But that’s just my two cents.