Leadership and Management: A Dynamic Duo
What do you say when your boss asks if you want to be a leader or a manager? You could respond: All managers must be leaders and all leaders must understand management. Or you could ask what roles and responsibilities are being discussed regardless of how they might be categorized. Basically, we need to reframe the conversation.
Whether looking at a role in a big corporation, a small nonprofit, or a university, the conversation needs to focus on what needs to get done and how — the role and responsibilities — not the title. Across all entities, it is how leadership and management relate and complement each other that is crucial. This is particularly relevant for new or smaller entities because they might need the skills and strengths of leadership and management within one person.
Recognizing Greatness
Practically speaking, the best leaders understand and respect management because that makes it possible to get things done. Managers are leaders within their areas and may be on their way to high-level leadership. It might take just one incident or situation to propel a manager up the ladder particularly in purpose-driven organizations where the mission drives action and inspiration throughout the entity.
A manager who cannot lead is not able to build trust and create engagement within an organization to get to where they need to go. — “Why All Managers Must Be Leaders” by Jacob Morgan, Forbes
Consider some great leaders: Tim Cook (Apple), Oprah Winfrey (Harpo Productions/Oprah Winfrey Network), Elisa Villanueva Beard (Teach for America), and the list goes on. They managed before they led and then learned to surround themselves with good managers so they could focus on innovation and organizational success. One aspect of their great leadership is that it is intertwined with great management. There could easily be a list of people once considered great leaders who proved otherwise over time because management was lacking.
Yet articles about organizations, studies, and theories address leadership — the good and the bad — far more often than management and generally neglect the importance of the relationship. And there are plenty of lists of great leaders but few about great managers.
Recognizing that leadership and management make a dynamic duo with superhero-like powers when considered together, here are thoughts on what it takes to be a strong leader-manager based on existing literature.
Are you a leader-manager or a manager-leader?
We can learn from Fairygodboss, a platform helping women succeed in business, as well as many other blogs that there are fundamental similarities with recognition that managers focus on the active and tactical with specific goals while leaders focus on the aspirational, motivational, and innovative.
Overall, good leaders have these traits and ensure that the organization has great management. If you are doing a team assessment for an entity, it should consider the balance of these strengths and responsibilities as provide by individuals.
The list of roles and responsibilities can be expanded as it is in a blog by Western Governors University. They emphasize similarities and the ability to be both a manager and a leader. Many of the characteristics that they attribute to leaders are crucial for managers as well. Instead of dividing skills and traits between leaders and managers, a better approach to the conversation would be to look at the relative importance of the responsibility for each position.
Looking at characteristics and strengths of leaders according to WGU, consider how these traits are important for both:
Similarly for the characteristics and strengths generally associated with Managers by WGU, they are often relevant for leaders as well:
With this blended approach of looking at management and leadership, you can look at any attribute and decide how it is important to your current role or for your aspirations. For example, if you are preparing for a promotion on the management track, perhaps you need to learn how to focus on people or empower a team because you already set specific project goals as a responsibility. This approach can also be used as a roadmap for someone starting with managing responsibilities and moving towards higher level leadership.
So, the next time you are asked about the difference between leadership and management, consider changing the conversation to addressing the role and responsibilities that are needed by the organization instead of the title of a position.
