Leadership and management
Knowing and being aware of the difference makes you better at both.
Leadership and management are as different as night and day. You need both night and day to make it through a week.
The English language distinguishes leaders from managers. Several European languages do not use this distinction and simply use the same word for both leaders and managers.
I find it very helpful to distinguish the two, and would like to elaborate on this.
My friend Tiffany used to work for the US Air Force. She told me she was taught that
“You manage systems, you lead people”
Management
Management is about systems, not about humans. It is about excel-sheets, schedules, money. Every project management book I have read talks about how the 3 most important aspects of project management are budget, time and resources. Not people, resources.
Or consider your HR-department. HR stands for Human Resources. It is not your “People Department”, it is not your “Department for Individuals”, it is about resources. The title implies that the humans are interchangeable. That is why the same rules apply to everyone (I would like to elaborate on this later on).
Leadership
Leadership on the other hand is about humans. You can only lead if someone else follows. You have to motivate the people on your team, and few people are motivated by how much money someone else can make because of their work, especially if they have never met that other person.
You have to motivate them by connecting with them on a human level. Excel will not help you with this. Active listening, talking about things unrelated to work, your own motivation — those can help you connecting.
But beware, human connection is difficult to fake. You have to be truly interested, else the other person will sense that something is wrong. Leave a comment if you want to know more about how you can make boring people interesting.
In short, management is about business schools stuff. Leadership is closer to liberal arts stuff.
For a manager, everyone is the same. For a leader, everyone is different.
The appointed manager and the organizational chart
Look at your company’s or project’s organizational chart. It shows you the managers. It doesn’t show the leaders. Managers are appointed by other managers higher up in the org-chart. Leaders cannot be appointed from the top, leaders are chosen from the bottom of the org-chart. Everyone chooses for themselves who they follow.
A good boss needs both management and leadership skills. However, management skills are easier to qualify and quantify. Leadership skills are more abstract, hence more difficult to evaluate.
That is part of the reason that bosses are appointed based more on their management skills than on their leadership skills.
Yin and yang
Like yin and yang, management and leadership skills complement each other. If you only have management skills, you are a robot. If you only have leadership skills, you are confused. Obviously you need both.
Management skills like making a good time schedule or budgeting how many hours someone has to do her job allows you to describe a task so your co-worker can understand it and deliver. This motivates them, and motivated people are easier to lead.
Connecting on a personal level allows you to get to know your co-workers better. That is how you find out that one of your co-workers is extremely detail-oriented and will take longer to finish his tasks (scheduling), but is less likely to make mistakes (risk analysis).
A side note on HR
I would like to clarify a point about HR. In the earlier paragraph I made it sound like HR-people are obsessed about systems without regard for the individual. That is not the case for the HR-people I have worked with.
HR-departments handle pay checks, employment contracts and holiday administration. These are vital functions that no-one notices until something goes wrong — and then all hell breaks loose. Pay checks, employment contracts and holiday administration are administrative work, this is pure management.
HR-people also help during job interviews, and in this context their work is all about individuals. Personality tests are the prime example that everyone is different.
In some contexts, HR has to consider everyone to be the same, in other contexts, HR focuses on the individual.
The same applies to a person with authority. Always be aware of the role you play in the particular situation: should you apply your management or your leadership skills?
