Management and leadership are two different things. They’re both essential to the success and growth of an organization, and they complement each other in ways little and large. But often the differences between them are lost amid the hustle and bustle of running a company.
You can think of management as the hard work of ensuring performance to a certain standard. That standard may involve money (such as a budget or a revenue target), or time (in the case of a deadline), or quality (as tolerance for defects), or production (a quota, say, or a truck waiting at the loading dock).
By contrast, you can think of leadership as the hard work of bringing about change—cultural, operational, structural—that depends on the discretionary but critical participation of people, who essentially choose the pace if not the direction of change.
Management and leadership both require their own energy, as well. But the energy for each comes from different sources.
Management takes its energy from the power of an organization’s hierarchy, and its thrust is accountability. Persons in a position of authority have the duty and power to enforce a standard.
Stylistically, communication for management is typically directive, authoritative, even implicitly threatening, because it reflects the imposition of accountability.
Leadership, on the other hand, takes its energy from its nobility, its quest for something big, and its empathy and connection with people. Influential leaders often emerge from relative obscurity or from institutional positions of dependency, not power. They get more from people by asking for and expecting more.
Stylistically, communication for leadership is ennobling, inspiring, and purposeful. It recognizes the de facto democratic nature of organizational change, and it reaches for a live-wire connection between leader and led. The thrust is opportunity to achieve and become something more than we are today or were yesterday.
To the extent that these differences are overlooked, most organizations default to the accountability of management. That’s not surprising, since the people in charge were schooled, selected, and rewarded for their ability to control results. But it misses the glorious potential for change that looms in opportunity, in the connectivity of real leadership.
Ask yourself:
- Does your organization value management over leadership?
- Does it appreciate the differences between management and leadership—not so much the differences in their position on your organizational chart, but the differences in their work?
- Does it recognize that the work of management and the work of leadership each has its own kind of energy?
- Does it see the profound stylistic differences between communication for the sake of management and communication for the sake of leadership?
- What could your organization accomplish with a greater appreciation of leadership?
- What should change?
- How can you change to embody the importance of leadership as a force for change?
Thomas Lee has been benchmarking best-practice companies in organizational communication for almost 15 years. To date he has personally benchmarked almost 30 leading American corporations, including 3M, Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, DuPont, Weyerhaeuser, Levi-Strauss, McDonald’s, Shell Exploration, Duke Energy, and many others.
