Do you manage or do you lead?

In my practice as a consultant and coach I have an opportunity to learn form many people and get to listen to many stories. One thing that has fascinated me in the last few years is the frequency with which people in mid- and upper level management and executive positions actually believe they are leading when all they are doing is managing.

When I ask them the questions: “Do you manage or do you lead?” Many folks look at me puzzled and reply: “Isn’t that pretty much the same thing?”

Well, no it isn’t – not by a long shot - and for everybody who wants to be or become a leader it needs to be very clear what the difference is.

Sometimes in life we run across something or an event occur with and around us that can change the direction we take. This happened to me in 2003 when I participated in an elective class for a Masters Degree in Organizational Management. Jeff Stauffer, my professor and now a good friend, taught an elective class about organizational change.

He asked us, the students, to review the situation of a company and come up with a strategic plan to generate positive change. As a guideline we were to use the steps described in John Kotter’s book “Leading Change”. This class and what I learned became the trigger for all or most of my decisions in business and my life. It helped me to understand how change works and what the difference between management and leadership is.

It made me so curious that I read all the other books Kotter had written to develop the change theory described in Leading Change. Later I decided to be so interested in this topic that I enrolled in a PhD program for Leadership and organizational change and in my business practice I have used the deep studies of Kotter’s theories in many cases to help organizations and individuals to improve.
Lately I have successfully integrated it into my coaching and leadership development services.

As often is the case, you best hear it from the horses mouth. So here is what Kotter wrote in 2001 in a Harvard business review article about management and leadership. It is as relevant today as it was then.

Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think. Leadership isn’t mystical and mysterious. It has nothing to do with having “charisma” or other exotic personality traits. It is not the province of a chosen few. Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it. Rather, leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action. Each has its own function and characteristic activities. Both are necessary for success in an increasingly complex and volatile business environment.

Most U.S. corporations today are overmanaged and underled. They need to develop their capacity to exercise leadership. Successful corporations don’t wait for leaders to come along. They actively seek out people with leadership potential and expose them to career experiences designed to develop that potential. Indeed, with careful selection, nurturing, and encouragement, dozens of people can play important leadership roles in a business organization. But while improving their ability to lead, companies should remember that strong leadership with weak management is no better, and is sometimes actually worse, than the reverse.

The real challenge is to combine strong leadership and strong management and use each to balance the other. Of course, not everyone can be good at both leading and managing. Some people have the capacity to become excellent managers but not strong leaders.

Others have great leadership potential but, for a variety of reasons, have great difficulty becoming strong managers. Smart companies value both kinds of people and work hard to make them a part of the team. But when it comes to preparing people for executive jobs, such companies rightly ignore the recent literature that says people cannot manage and lead. They try to develop leader-managers. Once companies understand the fundamental difference between leadership and management, they can begin to groom their top people to provide both.

Management is about coping with complexity. Its practices and procedures are largely a response to one of the most significant developments of the twentieth century: the emergence of large organizations. Without good management, complex enterprises tend to become chaotic in ways that threaten their very

Management is about coping with complexity.