We have often been drawn into the debate around the differences between leaders and managers. Our view is that both sets of skills and characteristics are equally necessary in business, but who does what and when is situational and dependant on the particular business in question and what it is trying to achieve. We also suspect that in recent years leadership has been regarded as somewhat sexier word than management - not true, they are just different, but usually equally necessary.
What we do come across very often is people who are perhaps in no-man's land - that grey area where managerial responsibility is very much part of their job, but they also have increasing involvement in all things strategic. It follows therefore that persuading others of the need to adopt a particular strategic path is going to require more "leaderly" skills than they may have deployed previously. Increasingly this can become a more and more crucial aspect of their job - and if the incumbent hasn't grasped exactly what it entails (and it isn't simply louder, faster, management) they can find themselves confused about their purpose and how they should be spending their time.
Many such managers need help to grasp the fact that being inspirational to others does in fact convert rather boringly to organised activities that take up time in the diary, as opposed to a lot of spontaneous white-charger riding whilst shouting inspirational utterances. It also means that some of the old "managing" style activities are going to have to be properly passed off elsewhere to someone with talent, even though they may have a pleasing whiff of familiarity and usefulness about them.
We thought we'd have a go at creating a fresher definition of the differences on a blank sheet of paper, to help some of our no-man's land clientele be clearer about what elements of each they should be focusing on in their particular job. If you'd like a full copy of this then please let us know and we'll send it to you.
As usual we'd love to hear from you - including any personal journeys through grey areas, violent disagreement with our thoughts, much better ideas than ours..feel free. |
homepage