Posts
How do you know when you have transitioned from managing to leading? Do you ever actually transition or do you add leadership into existing management abilities and practices?
If you Google the difference between management and leadership, you will likely find Warren Bennis’ semi-poetic piece that draws a pretty sharp line between the two. “The manager administers; the leader innovates. The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective. The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.” He’s also often quoted as saying, "Managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing." In other words, leadership is the vision and management is the execution.
Robert Sutton, however, says this distinction is misleading. He rightly notes that leaders cannot simply sit in an office and come up with big ideas, without a detailed understanding of the industry in which the organization operates, the staff who actually implement the ideas, and the individuals served by the organization. He proposes a better idea: "To do the right thing, a leader needs to understand what it takes to do things right, and to make sure they actually get done." In other words, a leader must have a vision for what should happen next and a detailed understanding of how to make that vision come to reality within the current context.
So rather than conceiving leadership and management as separate concepts with a bright line between them, perhaps it would be better to think of the two as a Venn diagram, incorporating the overlapping execution and contextual knowledge of good management and good leadership.
