Audio read by Dr. Jeff Mccausland
excerpt written by Jeff McCausland and Tom Vossler
LEADERSHIP VS. MANAGEMENT
The afternoon and evening of June 30th 1863 was a busy time for Union cavalry commander John Buford on the outskirts of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Fortunately, he had two capable subordinate commanders in the person of Colonels William Gamble and Thomas Devin. Thru these men Buford sought to exercise the leadership which would place his organization – his soldiers – in the right place and at the right time in order to be successful in the coming battle.
But John Buford also had a management function to fulfill. Having placed his organization in the best possible positions on the terrain west of Gettysburg, he also had to manage logistics for his organization – food, water, ammunition re-supply, medical support – which would sustain the soldiers in the positions in which he had deployed them. He had to also manage the intelligence gathering and the communication systems which would keep him informed of the actions of the enemy force about to strike and the friendly forces he expected to come to his aid. As in the classic two-minute drill on the football field with the losing team needing to score before time runs-out, he had to manage the clock. He had to manage the battlefield so that friendly forces arrived before enemy forces over-ran him. In sum, he had to manage all these resources in addition to providing leadership to his people.
If we were to use Google to find a definition of leadership, we would receive countless suggestions. President Dwight Eisenhower provided one of the best when he observed, “Leadership is the ability to decide what has to be done, and then get people to want to do it.” But Eisenhower would also agree that the bedrock of leadership remains two important characteristics— competence and character. People will follow someone if they believe they are capable and possess the knowledge/experience required. But they also want to believe that their leaders are people of character and integrity. Otherwise, we would have to conclude that Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Pol Pot were great leaders, as they “decided” what had to be done and “inspired” people to want to do it.
It is important, however, to reiterate that “leadership” is distinct from “management.” Management concentrates on work standards, resource allocation, and organizational design. Some historians suggest that the study of management can be traced back to early Sumerian traders or the artisans who built the pyramids of Egypt. Machiavelli wrote about what made organizations effective and efficient in his Discourses (1531). Still most would agree that it was not until the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that we encountered large, complex organizations and the split between owners versus day-to-day managers. With the arrival of mass production in the early twentieth century, colleges and universities created management degrees for both undergraduates and graduate programs to study this phenomenon in greater detail.
There is clearly some overlap between management and leadership, and any organization must be well managed if it is to succeed. But leadership is distinct. It is focused on vision, motivation, and trust. Effective leaders must move people and organizations into the future. They must deal with change. Buford’s actions on June 30, 1863, illustrate both leadership and management. He “decided what had to done” with his decision to position his forces west of Gettysburg to secure the Union army’s control of key terrain for the future. Buford discussed options with his subordinates, Gamble and Devin, to ensure not only that they fully understood what he had determined but also to solicit input. He then “managed” his organization effectively by allocating most of his force to confront the immediate problem of Confederate forces that were massing just west of the town while placing a smaller force north of the town to confront additional rebel forces that had been reported to be advancing from the vicinity of Harrisburg.
Modern leaders have this same challenge of managing their organizations as well as leading them. Former Chicago Cubs baseball manager Joe Maddon led his team to their first World Championship in over one hundred years in 2016. He and Cubs’ president of baseball operations, Theo Epstein, are credited with rebuilding the Cubs and ending the so-called “curse” that had bedeviled Chicago baseball fans for over a century. Epstein accepted his position with the team in the fall of 2011 and announced from the onset his vision of duplicating the success he enjoyed with the Boston Red Sox, where he had also overseen the development of a championship team in 2004. In his first year, however, the Cubs would lose over one hundred games. Epstein convinced Maddon to join the Cubs in 2014.
Following the 2016 championship season Maddon was frequently interviewed about baseball, management, and leadership. He observed that in baseball massive amounts of data are constantly reviewed to “manage” a team. Known as “sabermetrics,” a word derived from the acronym for the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR), it is the empirical analysis of baseball statistics to evaluate and compare the performance of individual players and includes such things as the speed of the pitch, how fast a player runs to first base, distance covered by outfielders, velocity of the ball coming off the bat, and so on. Maddon noted that successful leaders must use “data” effectively and determine which is the best data to make crucial day-to-day managerial decisions.
But, while this was necessary, it was not sufficient to build a world championship team. Maddon argued that championship teams required effective management but also leadership, which was all about “heartbeat”—or the human factor. Heartbeat is what determined whether a particular player was focused on himself and his performance or the greater good of the team. A player might have tremendous individual talent and associated “data” but not be an effective team member. Consequently, Maddon, like Buford before him, realized that management is a science, but leadership is an art form. Both are necessary if an organization is to maximize performance and achieve success in any endeavor.
Parts of this article are excerpted and adapted from Battle Tested! Gettysburg Leadership Lessons for 21st Century Leaders written by Jeffrey D. McCausland and Tom Vossler. Book is available September 1, 2020. Pre-order sales available now at: https://bit.ly/battletestedbook.