The Leader vs Manager debate

Leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems in action. Each has its own function and characteristic activities and both are essential.

However, management is about coping with complexity and leadership is about coping with change. While most companies tend to be over managed and underled, the reverse (overled and undermanaged is not necessarily better either). Consider a simple military analogy: A peacetime army can usually survive with good management up and down the hierarchy with some really good leadership at the top. However, a wartime army require competent leadership at all levels. No one yet has figured out how to manage people effectively into a battle; they must be led.

These different functions - coping with complexity vs coping with change - shape the characteristic activities of management and leadership. Each system of action involves what needs to be done, creating networks of people and relationships that can accomplish an agenda, and then trying to ensure that those people actually do the job. But each accomplishes these three tasks in different ways.

1. Companies manage complexity by planning and budgeting and establishing detailed steps to achieve those and allocating resources to accomplish these plans. By contrast leading an organization to constructive change begins first by setting a direction - developing a vision and strategies to accomplish that vision.

2. Management develops the capacity to achieve its plan by organising and staffing and devising systems to monitor implementation. The equivalent leadership activity is aligning people - communicating the direction and getting commitment.

3. Finally, management ensures plan accomplishment by controlling and problem solving - monitoring results vs plan by means of reports, meetings etc., and then planning and organising to solve the problems. But for leadership, achieving a vision requires motivating and inspiring, by appealing to basic but often untapped human needs, values and emotions.

Excerpts from HBR article What Leaders Really Do - John Kotter.

What RamP's Reading: Nov'16

Ideas Are Free: How the Idea Revolution Is Liberating People and Transforming Organizations

Ideas Are Free sets out a roadmap for totally integrating ideas and idea management into the way companies are structured and operate. Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder draw on their ten years experience with more than three hundred organizations in fifteen countries to show precisely how to design a system to take advantage of this virtually free, perpetually renewing font of innovation. Robinson and Schroeder deal with two fundamental principles of managing ideas that are highly counterintuitive - the importance of going after small ideas rather than big ones, and the problems with the most common reward schemes and how to avoid them. They describe how to make ideas part of everyone's job, and how to set up and run an effective process for handling ideas-how to take a good idea system and make it great. And they show how good idea systems have a profound impact on an organization's culture. At the end of each chapter they provide "Guerrilla Tactics for the Idea Revolutionary", actions to promote ideas that any manager can take on his or her own authority, and that require little or no resources.

Theory U -Leading from the Future as It Emerges

In this groundbreaking book, Otto Scharmer invites us to see the world in new ways and in so doing discover a revolutionary approach to learning and leadership. In most large systems today, we collectively create results that no one wants. What keeps us stuck in such patterns of the past? It’s our blind spot, that is, our lack of awareness of the inner place from which our attention and intention originate. By moving through Scharmer’s U process, we consciously access the blind spot and learn to connect to our authentic Self—the deepest source of knowledge and inspiration. Theory U offers a rich diversity of compelling stories, examples, exercises, and practices that allow leaders, organizations, and larger systems to cosense and coshape the future that is wanting to emerge.

Fierce Conversations: Achieving success in work and in life, one conversation at a time 

Fierce Conversations is a way of conducting business. An attitude. A way of life. Communications expert Susan Scott maintains that a single conversation can change the trajectory of a career, marriage or life. Whether these are conversations with yourself, partner, colleagues, customers, family or friends, Fierce Conversations shows you how to have conversations that count.