LEADING VERSUS MANAGING

Conventional wisdom makes a big distinction between being a leader and being a manager. Managing is all about getting things done, carrying out the orders from “those guys.” When you finally get to be one of “those guys,” you think you are supposed to be strategic, visionary, and above all that day-to-day stuff. You focus on creating the changes that others have to manage. After all, becoming a leader is a real achievement. Although there are many people who make good managers, very few become strong leaders. The faulty thinking, however, lies in the idea that for you to secure your leadership status, you can't walk around still acting like a manager. This is hardly the case.

I strongly believe that you will not be a good leader unless you are also a good manager. How can you possibly be effective as a leader if you don't have a track record of executing and implementing? If you are not willing and able to roll up your sleeves and make things happen, you are not going to be around for very long. You can call yourself by whatever title you want, but unless you can produce results, you are going to be an unemployed leader! No one is going to follow you—you are not winning. Your objective is both to elevate your ability to be a manager and become a leader. The two are not mutually exclusive.

When I first started out in my career, self-reflection helped me address what I saw as erroneous thinking regarding managing and leading. I first encountered this thinking more than thirty years ago when I was a student at Kellogg. One of my professors gave the class a self-evaluation that was supposed to draw out whether we had the potential to be a manager or a leader. I remember hoping that I would be labeled a leader instead of being relegated to becoming just a manager. My thought back then was that it would be a major disappointment, after working so hard to get my MBA, to be doomed to languish in the management box instead of making it into the leadership ranks.

As much as I wanted a particular outcome, I overcame the temptation to try to skew the results by guessing how to respond to the questions. I answered the questions truthfully and hoped for the best. My results, as I recall, were somewhat inconclusive, somewhere between being a manager and a leader.

The good news is that after graduating from Kellogg and working for several years, I realized that this thinking around managing versus leading was flawed. Through self-reflection I saw that someone could not be an effective leader if he or she did not also have strong management skills, such as prioritizing, allocating resources, and getting the right people in place. What part of these skills is not required for leadership? Because developing management skills was essential to being promoted to a leadership position, wasn't it only logical that those same skills would be critical to becoming an effective leader? There was absolutely no basis to the assumption that once I “graduated” into leadership, my management foundation would be worthless or outdated.