Leadership and Management

Sometimes people might be thinking ta leadership and management are two different fields . But We cannot ignore one while talking about the other. Despite valiant efforts to separate leadership from management, the two roles remain entangled. Now it does not matter whether you take them separately or jointly . Many refuse to differentiate between them at all. Some ignore management or confine it to a menial maintenance role operating in the engine room, "keeping things ticking over." With such a poor image, it's no wonder that so few want to be managers. Leadership is the glory role on the white charger, inspiring the troops to carry out grand visions.

Because leadership hogs the lion's share of the responsibility and credit for driving organizational success, management has little to do. This reality is unsustainable; today’s complex business environment demands a broader sharing of the load. In an age of obesity, our current concept of leadership is the most bloated idea in town. To slim leadership down, management must be given more to do. This calls for a major upgrade, making management a much more proactive, positive force in organizations.

Reasons Why it matters

We need to reinvent management because a radically new concept of leadership is emerging. The rise of Richard Florida's creative class¹ means that innovative knowledge workers who create the future are the new leaders.

Creative Class Leadership

To compete in the guerrilla war of ideas, we need creative class leadership, the bottom-up promotion of new products. Those in charge need to be recast as managers who show leadership only occasionally. This is a major change but an essential one wherever innovation is critical for success. If leadership simply promotes changes in direction, management must take on a hugely expanded role.

Leadership May became a bloated mess

Our thinking about leadership went off the rails when we over reacted to Japanese business success in the 1970s. Recognizing that efficient execution was no longer enough, we demanded more innovation and condemned managers for being bureaucratic. Instead of upgrading management from a mechanical, controlling function to a facilitative, developmental one, we reacted emotionally, replacing managers with leaders. Managers were tarred and feathered with language previously used to describe management styles. For example, prior to the Japanese invasion, we said that managers could initiate structure or show consideration for people, be task oriented or people oriented, theory X or theory Y. To punish managers for letting us down, we blessed leaders with the good-guy styles and damned management with the bad-guy ones. The next step was to portray leaders as transformational and managers as transactional. Management henceforth became a virtual four letter word.

Newly Labeled Leadership

This whole train of thought had disastrous consequences. Newly labeled "leaders" got stuck with the impossible demand of being cheerleaders, while management was painted into a dark corner where nobody wanted to be seen dead. If managers weren't quite in the grave yet, Abraham Zaleznik, a Harvard Business School emeritus professor of leadership, buried them by claiming that they were different types of people. They apparently lacked empathy and were control freaks, who could only motivate employees with "rewards, punishments, and other forms of coercion."² John Kotter attempted to save management with a functional definition. Management, he claimed, deals with complexity while leaders focus on change³. But in the 1980s, Kotter's thinking was constrained by management's fall from grace and he failed to create a fully functional story. Instead, his managers were limited to mechanical control with little to do but keep things ticking over in the engine room. Warren Bennis's well known saying: "leaders do the right things, managers do things right" at least recognized that doing things right was still important. But by the time Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner started writing about leadership, management was long gone, which is why it is completely absent in their writing. It has been all about leadership, however bloated, ever since.

By seizing the territory once occupied by management, leadership aims to motivate high levels of performance in employees. Motivation used to be what managers did until leadership usurped its role. The whole point of the transformational leadership bandwagon is nicely summed up in the title of Bernard Bass's well known book: Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations. Clearly such leadership is all about employee performance. Note that this book was published in 1985, at the height of the backlash against management.

But surely performance is within management's domain. There is no convincing argument to the contrary, beyond the emotional rationalizations brought on by the success of the Japanese. By constantly portraying leadership as a downward-directed effort to get work done through subordinates, it's hard to understand how it can be shown flowing in any other direction. How can leadership be shown going sideways to colleagues or upward if it simply promotes a better way and has nothing to do with getting things done through people? The old idea of informal leadership is no help because it still entails taking charge of a group and directing its efforts toward a goal.

It is time to put 1980s thinking behind us and make a fresh start. We are over the Japanese crisis, and innovation is even more important than it was in the 70s and 80s.