What I want to talk to you about today is the important difference between leadership and management.
We often say in our work that leadership is defined as deciding what has to be done and getting others to want to do it. But frequently in my studies and my travel, I find people using the terms leadership and management interchangeably and I think that is not precise and perhaps forces us not to think carefully.
So let’s dissect that a bit. What exactly is management?
MANAGEMENT IS ABOUT
WORK STANDARDS
RESOURCE ALLOCATION
ORGANIZATION DESIGN
If you look at the history of management in the United States at least, it goes back to around the onset of WWI with the creation of schools of business administration, business management, and masters degrees at major universities. It was about this time, for example, that Harvard University created its masters in business administration.
LEADERSHIP IS ABOUT
VISION
MOTIVATION
TRUST
DEVELOPING PEOPLE & ORGANIZATIONS
DEALING WITH CHANGE
THINKING IN TIME
There’s certainly an overlap, there’s a Venn diagram that exists between the two concepts. But they are, in fact, a little bit distinct. Let me use an example from one of my favorite pasttimes, and of course that is baseball. I am a great baseball fan and watch countless baseball games during the season. My favorite team is Chicago Cubs and certainly in my lifetime one of my happiest days was the Fall of 2016, after a hundred years, the Cubs managed to win the World Series. The key in that particular effort, I think, was the selection of the new manager, a new leader, a guy by the name of Joe Maddon.
Maddon was once asked about the difference between leadership and management in terms of baseball that I think drew a very clear distinction between his duties as a manager and his duties as a leader in trying to create what has been a very successful organization. He said management for baseball was about the use of data. If you study baseball as an organization, as a concept or whatever you like, over the last decade or so it has become heavily engrossed in all types of statistics that we measure the success of players (e.g. how fast they can run, how hard they hit the ball, what the angle the ball is coming off their bat, how fast they can move in the outfield, how much the ball spins as the pitcher throws a curve-ball, or certainly how fast he throws it when he throws a fastball, how fast the ball comes off the bat when a player hits it.)
All that enormous amount of data is examined very carefully in trying to select players to be part and parcel of a particular team. That’s very important and very effective- there’s no doubt about it. Maddon said that one of the things he has to do now is look at more and more data and also determine which of that data is really the most important in analyzing the overall strength of players and the consummate strength of the entire team.
But then he went on to say that leadership was more subjective.
“IF MANAGEMENT IS ABOUT DATA, LEADERSHIP IS ABOUT HEARTBEAT.” -JOE MADDON
We have to talk to this particular player when we acquire him for the team or draft him for the team. Is he a good fit for our team? Will he be a real team player? Does he think more about the name on the back of the jersey than he does about the name on the front of the jersey? We interview him. We interview his parents, perhaps. We interview his girlfriend, maybe his ex-girlfriend, or his wife or his ex-wife. We’re trying to determine that while he might have the right data- the fastest, the hardest hitting guy around, if he hasn’t got the heartbeat, he won’t fit well in our organization.
Making that determination is really a leadership choice as opposed to a management choice.
In sum, I would say when you think of management which is very very important, largely as a science, while leadership is an art form in many ways.
MANAGEMENT IS A SCIENCE, BUT LEADERSHIP IS AN ART FORM
Now, as you move up to increasing levels of responsibilities in any organization, as a leader you have to consider this fact that you will need to spend more time focusing on the leadership aspects of your job and less time thinking about management as you now have to accept the fact that a lot of day-to-day choices in management terms, at least, are going to be delegated for those you have selected as part and parcel of the successful team you’re creating.
We want to hear from YOU! How do you differentiate leadership and management? As a leader, how do you change from taking over day-to-day operations to leading your team to success? Share your comments below.