Fleshing Out Differences Between Management and Leadership

Regular readers of the Minding Gaps blog know that we bring not just a scalpel but a meat cleaver to distinctions between management and leadership.

We define them both not by position or level in an organization but rather by the work, the purpose, the energy, and the communication that differentiate them. Anyone in a position of authority in any organization carries the burden and opportunity of both; the CEO manages as well as leads, and the front-line supervisor leads as well as manages. 

Briefly, we think of management as the work of ensuring a group’s performance of a task to a predetermined standard of some sort. If the standard involves money, we call it making budget or making the numbers. If it involves time, we call it beating a deadline. If it involves quantity, perhaps in terms of sales or production, we call it exceeding a quota. Often it involves anomalies in product quality or a linear process such as manufacturing, and there we refer to it as quality control or process control.

Conversely, we think of leadership as the work of bringing about change, either cultural or operational, through the discretionary (or optional) and often self-sacrificing efforts of people. That requires knitting together disparate people as a coalition or community, identifying and describing a threat or opportunity, developing and offering a cause (or solution) that addresses the concern, modeling the behaviors appropriate to that cause, campaigning for the cause, and finally meeting the rewards of success or the penalties for failure. All of that is in orbit around the connection between leaders and the led.

It is important to emphasize that we define and compare these two concepts as work, not as levels of responsibility or as positions in an organization. The nature of the work is what counts.

Prior posts in Minding Gaps have explored, and future posts will continue to explore, particular aspects of this model. Today, I want to devote some attention to differences in style, disposition, and communication serving the purposes of management, on the one hand, and the purposes of leadership, on the other hand.

Consider this framework:

Aspect	Work of Management	Work of Leadership
Nature of work relationship	Legal, official, structural	Intuitive, perceptual, fluid
Source of authority	Power, employment	Insight, conviction, shared values
Presumption of manager	Atypical knowledge	Atypical wisdom
Best-case scenario	Influence for meeting expectations	Inspiration for realizing a vision
Orientation	To the task	To the person, the relationship
Thrust	Accountability, dependability	Opportunity, innovation
Consequences	Rewards or penalties	Satisfaction or dissatisfaction
Language, rhetoric	Directive, commanding, “I”	Inviting, collaborative, “we”
Process	Iterative, corrective	Exploratory, adaptive
Peril of insufficiency, too little	Purpose, motivation	Attention to detail
Peril of excess, too much	Micro-managing, self-execution	Leeway, loss of focus and drive
Need for empathy	Of marginal, occasional importance	Of great, constant importance
Attitude toward exceptions	Fear of deviation (snafus)	Hope for deviation (ideas)
Motivational energy	Requires external impetus	Potentially self-sustaining
Systems, training required	Typically already in place	Typically needs deployment

As you look over this chart, ask yourself these questions:

• What makes immediate and obvious sense here?

• What don’t you quite grasp?

• What is most challenging to your own style?

• Do you see how the work of management and the work of leadership are complementary?

• What aspects of your own business require the steady hand of management?

• What aspects of your business can benefit from less management and more leadership?

• What kinds of leadership should your extended management team do more of?

• How are you supporting the leadership work of your middle managers and front-line supervisors?

Feel free to telephone us at +1-847-247-2241, or write to us at info@arceil.com, for more explanation. And, yes, we do offer workshops in leadership development (apologies for shameless plug).