What do leaders and managers really do?
As a trustee at two schools, consultant and executive coach to others, and friend to people at many others, I worry about profound near-term pressures on faculty, staff, and administration. They are dealing with unbelievable challenges in the midst of COVID-19. Only acts of great management—management of self and management of others—keeps them afloat.
At the same time, I worry about long-term threats to those schools, which COVID-19 has accelerated. Only acts of great leadership—leadership of self and leadership of others—will help them survive and thrive.
In my lifetime, the demands of management and leadership have never felt greater. Often the terms are conflated or confused. For a clear distinction, my money is on Peter Drucker, who famously said, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” [1]
But what do leaders and managers really do? That’s a variation on the title of a classic Harvard Business Review article, which offers these distinctions:
Management plans and budgets to achieve predictable and orderly results. This is essential. Leadership sets direction to produce positive change, the experience of which will not be predictable or orderly. Yet this too is essential.
Management organizes people to enable them to work effectively (and, when possible, efficiently). This is essential. Leadership aligns people around a shared vision and invites them to discover themselves in that journey, which often disturbs the way people are organized. This too is essential.
Management solves problems so that people can do their daily work with a minimum of friction. This is essential. Leadership motivates so that people feel purpose, belonging, autonomy, and the energy [2] to do the hard work of change. By definition, motivation means moving people from one state to another, and this almost always involves some degree of discomfort [3]—this too is essential.
Perhaps the most important question, then, is this:
Does this moment call on me to manage or to lead?
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[1] In that formulation, managers can do “the wrong thing” perfectly. Drucker had something to say about that, too: “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.”
[2] We can take a lesson from Chemistry here: for a reaction (“change”) to take place, a minimum amount of energy—“activation energy”—is required. By motivating people, leaders enable them to achieve the activation energy necessary to do the new things required for the journey.
[3] In his new book The Practice, Seth Godin writes, “Change requires tension. […] Discomfort engages people, keeps them on their toes, makes them curious. Discomfort is the feeling we all get just before change happens. But this new form of hospitality—of helping people change by taking them somewhere new—can make us personally uncomfortable as well. It might feel easier to simply ask people what they want and do that instead.” As the Rolling Stones sang, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try real hard, you just might find you get what you need.”
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