Reframing Leadership: Why We Need Leaders, Not Managers

In today’s rapidly changing world, successful organizations thrive not on control, but on inspiration and empowerment. Yet, many companies still conflate management with leadership, hindering both. I wrote in my last leadership blog post that management is killing leadership. We need to stop referring to people as managers and then expecting them to have leadership behaviors. People do not operate at their best when they are managed. People will change their behaviors and attitudes when they are led.

Lead people, manage the things they work on

Management is part of leadership, however, management should ride on the shoulders of leadership. This means that management is about managing the things that people work on, while leadership is about the people. When we start managing both people and things, then we are leading nothing.

The most effective way to separate leadership from management is to separate the things people work on versus the people. I have created a table which highlights Leadership actions in one column and management in a second column.

The lines can get blurry because people work on things. The key is to separate what is people leadership from the things that people work with or on.

Leadership Actions	Management Actions
Inspiring & influencing	Writing policies
Engaging others	Organizing
Coaching/Mentoring	Instructing/Informing
Training “soft” skills	Training for the job or systems/tools
Goal setting	Planning & Prioritizing
Feedback & Feed Forward	Performance reviews
Delegating for individual growth	Measuring and reporting
Aligning people with the purpose	Aligning people with systems/processes
Strategy development – the why & what	Tactical planning – the who & how
Celebrating & Recognition	Tracking and distributing
Multi-dimensional relationship ownership	Controlling costs
Asking for feedback	Ensuring compliance
Offering to help or support	Coordinating meetings and tracking actions

A practical example

For example, aligning people around a newly formed project is about ensuring the people have an understanding of the project and that they have buy-in. Each person needs to know their value on the team. Aligning people with system or processes is the management piece of project leadership. In this instance it is about clearly defining their roles on the team, assigning actions items, project planning, securing resources, etc. A person that does not understand or believe in the purpose of a project may be assigned but was not aligned. Both matter, but assignment assuming alignment is detrimental to the project’s success.

A person that does not understand or believe in the purpose of a project may have been assigned but was not aligned.

If a project team does not buy-in or have clarity of purpose (the WHY), then all of the management details (the WHO & HOW) become less important. When a team becomes disillusioned with program or challenges, it is leadership that reinvigorates the team, not excellent management practices. Leadership is fueling people such that they have an internal drive to push forward, management just ensures they are properly assigned to the project tasks and deliverables.

This is why management always rides on the shoulders of leadership.

The call to action

We need to stop using the term management when discussing leadership. We also need to change job titles from manager to leader for anyone that has people reporting to them. We then need to train leaders how to lead, empower leaders to lead, and inspire leaders to lead. If management is about compliance, then leadership is about inspiring. Let’s change our language and our mindset about leadership.