Leader vs Manager

Both a manager and a leader may know the business well. But the leader must know it better and in a different way. S/he must grasp the essential facts and the underlying forces that determine the past and present trends in the business, so that s/he can generate a vision and a strategy to bring about its future. One telling sign of a good leader is an honest attitude towards the facts, towards objective truth. A subjective leader obscures the facts for the sake of narrow self-interest, partisan interest or prejudice. Effective leaders continually ask questions, probing all levels of the organization for information, testing their own perceptions, and rechecking the facts. They talk to their constituents. They want to know what is working and what is not. They keep an open mind for serendipity to bring them the knowledge they need to know what is true. An important source of information for this sort of leader is knowledge of the failures and mistakes that are being made in their organization. To survive in the twenty-first century, we are going to need a new generation of leaders leaders, not managers. The distinction is an important one. Leaders conquer the context the turbulent, ambiguous surroundings that sometimes seem to conspire against us and will surely suffocate us if we let them while managers surrender to it. Leaders investigate reality, taking in the pertinent factors and analyzing them carefully. On this basis they produce visions, concepts, plans, and programs. Managers adopt the truth from others and implement it without probing for the facts that reveal reality. There is profound difference a chasm between leaders and managers. A good manager does things right. A leader does the right things. Doing the right things implies a goal, a direction, an objective, a vision, a dream, a path, a reach. Lots of people spend their lives climbing a ladder and then they get to the top of the wrong wall. Most losing organizations are over-managed and under-led. Their managers accomplish the wrong things beautifully and efficiently. They climb the wrong wall. Managing is about efficiency. Leading is about effectiveness. Managing is about how. Leading is about what and why. Management is about systems, controls, procedures, policies, and structure. Leadership is about trust about people.

Leadership is about innovating and initiating. Management is about copying, about managing the status quo. Leadership is creative, adaptive, and agile. Leadership looks at the horizon, not just the bottom line. Leaders base their vision, their appeal to others, and their integrity on reality, on the facts, on a careful estimate of the forces at play, and on the trends and contradictions. They develop the means for changing the original balance of forces so that their vision can be realized. A leader is someone who has the capacity to create a compelling vision that takes people to a new place, and to translate that vision into action. Leaders draw other people to them by enrolling them in their vision. What leaders do is inspire people, empower them. They pull rather than push. This "pull" style of leadership attracts and energizes people to enroll in a vision of the future. It motivates people by helping them identify with the task and the goal rather than by rewarding or punishing them. There is a profound difference between management and leadership, and both are important "To manage" means "to bring about, to accomplish, to have charge of or responsibility for, to conduct." "Leading" is "influencing, guiding in direction, course, action, opinion." The distinction is crucial. Management is... Coping with complexity Planning and Budgeting Organizing and Staffing Controlling and Problem Solving Leadership is.... Coping with and promoting change Setting a Direction Aligning People Motivating and Inspiring People

Effective Action Both are necessary and important.

Meaningful Action

Managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing. The difference may be summarized as activities of vision and judgment effectiveness versus activities of mastering routines efficiency. The chart below indicates key words that further make the distinction between the two functions: The manager administers; the leader innovates. The manager is a copy; the leader is an original. The manager maintains; the leader develops. The manager accepts reality; the leader investigates it. The manager focuses on systems and structure; the leader focuses on people. The manager relies on control; the leader inspires trust. The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective. The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why. The manager has his or her eye always on the bottom line; the leader has his or her eye on the horizon. The manager imitates; the leader originates.

 The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it. The manager is the classic good soldier; the leader is his or her own person. The manager does things right; the leader does the right thing. The most dramatic differences between leaders and managers are found at the extremes: poor leaders are despots, while poor managers are bureaucrats in the worst sense of the word. Whilst leadership is a human process and management is a process of resource allocation, both have their place and managers must also perform as leaders. All first-class managers turn out to have quite a lot of leadership ability. With thanks by Warren Bennis and Joan Goldsmith to "Learning to Lead"

1/ http://www.futurevisions.org/mgr_ldr.htm

From Manager to Leader

Too many of those in positions of some power are self-absorbed, arrogant and interpersonally inept. When it comes to subordinates, most managers are blissfully comfortable with themselves, blindly indifferent to the needs of others, and relatively disinclined to do anything that does not provide immediate self-benefit. Should we be surprised? Anyone who works for a company today knows how self-interest gets rewarded, understands the pressure to self-aggrandize, and recognizes that corruption has been made interpersonally legal. It's the rare and special leader who sheds those self-imposed limitations on the way up the ladder to become someone truly worth following.

Typically, we are called in when high-flying executives have hit an abrupt interpersonal wall. Either they have suddenlyand for no apparent reasonlost the support, commitment and admiration of "their people"; or they have so alienated colleagues, customers, or staff that their careers are in immediate jeopardy. This is not a rare occurrence. In fact, it happens all the time. Managers, by nature, rarely figure out what it takes to be a real leader without the healthy shock of imminent derailment. They are simply not hard-wired to let go of the technical skills, capabilities, and intelligence that got , them where they are today, in order to embrace a new, softer skill set that will serve themselves and others better from now on. The work that we do is (and must be) developmentally based. Generally, we engage (often intermittently) with a client over a two-year time frame. Anything less is nothing more than assuaging upper management that something is being done. We are not interested in what might be considered palliative; what we really want to accomplish is something meaningful. In our model, we teach managers to develop three behavioral constructs: First, we guide managers in learning how to be irreverent. Leaders need to look at themselves from the point of view that who they are and what they are doing is worth examining, doubting, and changing. Second, we try to invoke a sense of courage. Leaders need courage to confront the dark corners where so much of their dysfunction resides, and they need courage to become someone fundamentally different in overcoming those handicaps. Third, we help managers develop a sense of passion. Leaders must have a sense of passion about creating a better "them" because that is the only thing that creates a better "us." Without the irreverence to question assumptions, the courage to act and grow in ways that are fundamentally awkward and risky, and the passion to really care about what happens to themselves, their people, and the world a leader is not worth following. We measure our success in two ways. First, is the manager now producing the interpersonal results that they intend to produce, as opposed to having those effects occur haphazardly and caustically? Second, do the people that the manager affects feel better toward them, have greater respect for them, and view them as more credible, responsible, and trustworthy? In other words, the criteria for success lie outside the manager. We evaluate the impact of the leader by the impact on the followers.

"What kind of manager am I?" "How do I affect the people around me?" "Who do I need to become to bring out the best in others?" Real leaders ask those sorts of questions of themselves all the time. They know that introspection, critical self-examination, painful honesty, and a willingness to change and grow are essential leadership tools. To accomplish that sort of deep, behavioral shift, the manager's own desire to change is the critical ingredient. I respectfully (if not irreverently) disagree. In my narcissistic opinion, what managers really need is a solid dose of panic. Anything less will fail to provide them with sufficient motivation to try something different, let alone become someone differenta person who is Responsible, Empowering, Accountable, and Loving to themselves and others. Leadership, at any level, is fundamentally about the relationship between people. Without a relationship, there is no trust and without trust, leadership doesn't grow.

Managers Bottom Line

In 1984 Harold Geneen, CEO of ITT, provided a two-sentence course on management. He said that although you read a book from the beginning to the end, you run an organization the opposite way. You start with the end and then you do everything you must do to reach it. Whilst all good managers also have leadership abilities, management is more than leading people. It has many more components. Management is also routine administration, supervision, and knowledge of procedures, rules and regulations; for instance it requires knowledge and understand of process and procedures. However, it should focus on the results to be achieved. Managerial success is actually measured by achievement, not by the process used to accomplish the results. Based on this results-oriented philosophy of management, the new definition focuses on outcomes. On that basis, management can be defined as the act of setting goals and taking responsibility for producing positive results. The implication is that managers are held accountable, not only for their own personal effectiveness, but for the output and results of others in their unit, team and organization.

The corollary is that the effective manager begins by defining the end result and then does what is necessary to accomplish it. The question is not one of what the manager can control but of what they can contribute. The effective manager decides what result is required (the goal-setting stage), ensures that action steps are taking (the process) and takes responsibility for producing the outcome. Success will be measured by the degree to which a goal is accomplished. If only life were this simple. It is more realistic to view success in terms of a batting average. Success in the managerial world is a matter of degree. Thus managerial performance cannot be judged entirely in terms of success or failure. An organization that does so tends to be a blameculture and the end result is always a CYA (cover your ass) culture. The most positive focus is on lessons learned, where learning is a core value. In this sense, success becomes a journey, rather than a destination. We cannot produce positive results every time. There is always room for mistakes and even failure, but there is never room for complacency or low standards. Whilst managers can and should work towards positive results, they are not the only thing and the ends do not justify all means. While positive results will not, for example, justify unscrupulous means used to attain success, appropriate means do not justify unsatisfactory results. Means and methods are designed to achieve some specific end. When circumstances change and new means are called for, it often turns out that the old ones have become sacrosanct. The means have become ends in themselves - perhaps they are no longer effective but they are enshrined. Means and ends, processes and goals must be in alignment in order to attain positive results.

Managing the Interpersonal Skills

Managers spend a great deal of their time with other people, about 50 per cent of it with subordinates, at scheduled or informal meetings. There have been a number of studies of the effects of the different supervisory styles of secondline leaders on productivity and job satisfaction; these show that they have a greater influence on productivity and satisfaction than first-line leaders. A number of studies have shown that delegation and the use of participatory methods of leadership are effective at both levels.

Styles of leadership are often passed down the hierarchy as each person copies his or her immediate superior and may be rewarded by the superior for so doing. This "falling dominoes" effect has been found for participatory leadership, closeness of supervision, charismatic leadership and amount of interaction with subordinates. Managers need the skills used by first-line superiors and the additional skills of managing organizations. These include chairmanship, presenting skills, appraisal and personnel interviewing skills. Not all managers are socially skilled. Some may have been promoted through their expertise at engineering or accountancy, and these are the people for whom management courses were originally devised.

Effective Managers
HOW EFFECTIVE EXECUTIVES APPROACH THEIR JOBS The very nature of executive jobs requires a complex and subtle approach to planning, organizing, staffing, and so forth. The approach needs to take into account the uncertainty involved, as well as the diversity and volume of potentially relevant information. It must also come to grips with the difficult human environment; it must somehow help executives get things done despite their dependency on a large number of people, many of whom are not their subordinates. An examination of effective general managers suggests that they have found just such an approach, a central part of which might be usefully thought of as "agenda setting" and "network building." To understand why effective GMs behave as they do, it is essential first to recognize the types of challenges and dilemmas found in most of their jobs, the two most fundamental of which are: Figuring out what to do despite uncertainty, great diversity, and an enormous amount of potentially relevant information. Getting things done through a large and diverse set of people despite having little direct control over most of them.

The severity of these challenges in complex organizations is much greater than most non-executives would suspect. And the implications for the traditional management functions of planning, staffing, organizing, directing and controlling are powerful. Research of effective general managers indicates that a central part of their approach is agenda setting and network building. EXECUTION: GETTING NETWORKS TO IMPLEMENT AGENDAS After they have largely developed their networks and agendas, effective GMs tend to shift their attention toward using the networks to implement their agendas. In doing so they marshal their interpersonal skills, budgetary resources and information and information to help persuade these people. Under other circumstances, they will use resources available to them to negotiate a trade. And occasionally, they even resort to intimidation and coercion. Effective GMs also often use their networks to exert indirect influence on people, including people who are not a part of that network. In some cases, GMs will convince one person who is in their network to get a second, who is not, to take some needed action. More indirectly still, GMs will sometimes approach a number of different people, requesting them to take actions that would then shape events that influence other individuals. Perhaps the most common example of indirect influence involves staging an event of some sort. In a typical case, the GM would set up a meeting or meetings and influence others through the selection of participants, the choice of an agenda, and often by his own participation. Unlike the case of direct influence, GMs achieve much of their more indirect influence through symbolic methods. That is, they use meetings, architecture, language, stories about the organization, time, and space as symbols in order to get some message across indirectly. All effective GMs seem to get things done this way, but the best performers do so more than others and with greater skill. That is, the better performers tend to mobilize more people to get more things done, and do so using a wider range of influence tactics. "Excellent" performers ask, encourage, cajole, praise, reward, demand, manipulate, and generally motivate others with great skill in face-to-face situations. They also rely more heavily on indirect influence than the "good" managers, who tend to rely on a more narrow range of influence techniques and apply them with less finesse.6 HOW THE JOB DETERMINES BEHAVIOR

Most of the visible patterns in daily behavior seem to be direct consequences of the way GMs approach their job, and thus consequences of the nature of the job itself and the type of people involved. More specifically, some of these patterns seem to derive from the approach taken to agenda setting, others from network building, others from how they tend to use networks to implement agendas, and still others from the approach in general. Spending most of the time with others (pattern 1) seems to be a natural consequence of the GM's overall approach to the job and the central role the network of relationships plays. As we saw earlier, GMs develop a network of relationships with those the job makes them dependent on and then use that network to help create, implement, and update an organizational agenda. As such, the whole approach to the job involves interacting with people. Hence it should not be surprising to find that on a daily basis, GMs spend most of their time with others. Likewise, because the network tends to include all those the GM is dependent on, it is hardly surprising to find the GM spending time with many besides a boss and direct subordinates (pattern 2). And because the agenda tends to include items related to all the long-, medium-, and short-run responsibilities associated with the job, it is to be expected that the breadth of topics covered in daily conversations might be very wide (pattern 3). A few of the other patterns seem to be a direct consequence of the agenda-setting approach employed by GMs. As we saw earlier, agenda setting involves gathering information on a continuous basis from network members, usually by asking questions. Major agenda-setting decisions are often invisible, they occur in the GMs mind, created by the information in hand. Network building involves the use of a wide range of interpersonal tactics. Since humor and nonwork discussions can be used as effective tools for building relationships and maintaining them under stressful conditions, these tools are used frequently. Since maintaining relationships requires that one deal with issues that other people feel are important (regardless of their centrality to the business) it is also not surprising to find the GMs spending time on substantive issues that seem unimportant to us and them. The best performers are particularly adept at grasping and taking advantage of each item in the random succession of time and issue fragments that crowd [their] day[s]. And central to their ability to do so are their networks and agendas. The agendas allow the GMs to react in an opportunistic (and highly efficient) way to the flow of events around them, yet knowing that they are doing so within some broader and more rational framework. The networks allow terse (and very efficient) conversations to happen; without them, such short yet meaningful conversations would be impossible. Together, the agenda and networks allow the GMs to achieve the efficiency they need to cope with very demanding jobs in fewer than 60 hours per week (pattern 12), through daily behavior patterns that on the surface can look "unmanagerial."

WHAT SHOULD TOP MANAGERS DO? Some of the most important implications of all this include the following: 1. At the start, putting someone in a GM job who does not know the business or the people involved, because he is a successful "professional manager," is probably very risky. Unless the business is easy to learn, it would be very difficult for an individual to learn enough, fast enough, to develop a good agenda. And unless it is a small situation with few people involved, it would be difficult to build a strong network fast enough to implement the agenda. Especially for large and complex businesses, this condition suggests that "growing" one's own executives should have a high priority. Many companies today say that developing their own executives is important, but in light of the booming executive search business, one has to conclude that either they are not trying very hard or that their efforts simply are not succeeding. 2. Management training courses, both in universities and in corporations, probably overemphasize formal tools, unambiguous problems, and situations that deal simplistically with human relationships. Some of the time-management programs, currently in vogue, are a good example of the problem here. Based on simplistic conceptions about the nature of managerial work, these programs instruct managers to stop letting people and problems "interrupt" their daily work. They often tell potential executives that short and disjointed conversations are ineffective. They advise that one should discipline oneself not to let "irrelevant" people and topics get on one's schedule. In other words, they advise people to behave differently from the effective executives in this study. Seminars on "How to Run Meetings" are probably just as bad. Another example of inappropriate courses is university-based executive training programs that emphasize formal quantitative tools. These programs are based, at least implicitly, on the assumption that such tools are central to effective performance. All evidence suggests that while they are sometimes relevant, they are hardly central.

3. People who are new in general management jobs can probably be gotten up to speed more effectively than is the norm today. Initially, a new GM usually needs to spend consider-able time collecting information, establishing relationships, selecting a basic direction for his or her area of responsibilities, and developing a supporting organization. During the first three to six months, demands from superiors to accomplish specific tasks, or to work on pet projects, can often be counterproductive. Indeed, anything that significantly diverts attention away from agenda setting and network building can prove to be counterproductive. In a more positive sense, those who oversee GMs can probably be most helpful initially if they are sensitive to where the new executive is likely to have problems and help him or her in those areas. Such areas are often quite predictable. For example, if people have spent their careers going up the ladder in one function and have been promoted into the general manager's job in an autonomous division (a common occurrence, especially in manufacturing organizations), they will probably have problems with agenda setting because of a lack of detailed knowledge about the other functions in the division. On the other hand, if people have spent most of their early careers in professional, staff, or assistant-to jobs and are promoted into a GM's job where they suddenly have responsibility for hundreds or thousands of people (not an unusual occurrence in professional organizations), they will probably have great difficulty at first building a network. They don't have many relationships to begin with and they are not used to spending time developing a large network. In either case, a GM's boss can arrange activities that foster instead of retard the types of actions the new executive should be taking. 4. Finally, the formal planning systems within which many GMs must operate probably hinder effective performance. A good planning system should help a GM create an intelligent agenda and a strong network that can implement it. That is, it should encourage the GM to think strategically, to consider both the long and short term, and, regardless of the time frame, to take into account financial, product / market, and organizational issues. Furthermore, it should be a flexible tool that the executive can use to help build a network. It should give the GM leeway and options, so that, depending on what kind of environment among subordinates is desired, he or she can use the planning system to help achieve the goals. Unfortunately, most of the planning systems used by corporations do nothing of the sort. Instead, they impose a rigid number crunching requirement on GMs that often does not require much strategic or long-range thinking in agenda setting and which can make network building and maintenance needlessly difficult by creating unnecessary stress among people. Indeed, some systems seem to do nothing but generate paper, often a lot of it, and distract executives from doing those things that are really important.