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The real Manager/Boss/Leader relationship
Dean Butler • Dec 06, 2019
Management and Leadership skills are complementary
Reading most posts and info-graphics about management and leadership today and you are led to believe that leadership is good, management is bad. This is like comparing a perfect orange to a rotten apple, and completely wrong. Management and Leadership can each be good or bad. They are completely different skills sets in which you can be skilled or unskilled, be effective or ineffective, apply appropriately or inappropriately.
Management is not, as Simon Sinek has said, "the practice of manipulating people for personal gain." Management is, as Sinek has also said, about "getting stuff done." John Kotter has been writing and speaking about the difference between management and leadership since the '80s. He defines management as "as set of well know processes . . . which help an organization predictably do what it knows how to do well." Good, effective, appropriate management is hard. It is necessary for the success of all organizations. It is not leadership.
Kotter has said "Leadership is about vision, about people buying in, about empowerment and, most of all, about producing useful change." Sinek has promoted and expanded on this idea of leadership at least since his book It Starts with Why
, a must read. I agree that good, effective, appropriate leadership is just that, but leadership too can be bad, ineffective, and inappropriate. Leadership is, simply, having followers.
A leader has followers because they either enforce accepted group norms, the status quo, or they inspire others toward that useful change. If you are an executive of an organization, are in a supervisory role, or head a team and are struggling with leading your team, department, or organization in producing that useful change, even though you have shared your vision, your Why, and done everything else you learned were the key attributes of a leader, then look for the person in your group who is a better, more effective leader, enforcing the status quo.
Oh, and the boss? That is just someone put in an organizational position of having supervisory responsibility for others. I've had good bosses and bad. The best was a great manager and a great leader.
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