What’s the Role of Management?

Very often, in discussions on leadership, someone will use the word “manage.” Invariably this leads someone to erupt, “I’m not a MANAGER. I’m a LEADER!,” or something along those lines. My suggestion: relax.

Yes, it’s true: management and leadership are two different things. But management is part of successful leadership. Every manager may not be a leader, but every leader needs to be a manager.

Leadership is about people. It’s about getting them to do what you want them to do and having them think it’s their own idea. It’s about helping them motivate themselves. It’s about giving them a vision of the future and taking them down the best path. Leadership is, frankly, much more interesting than management (for most people, anyway).

Management, on the other hand, is about…stuff. It’s about resources, like time, money, or office space. It can also be about people, in the sense of people as resources. Largely, it’s about overseeing the process rather than the final product. Sometimes it doesn’t seem as exciting or sexy as leadership (Is leadership sexy? That’s a subject for another post.) but if you do not do it right, even the best leader will fail.

Why? Well, consider a situation where you have brought together all the right people, you have a common vision, everybody is motivated to make it work, and all of you are excited. Then, you don’t pay them. The fact that you got these people all excited about something new means nothing if they leave because they can’t feed themselves. Or let’s say you have everyone all motivated to move forward on a project, but you have only got one week in which to do three weeks of work. Ooooooh, bad scheduling…and ultimately, a bad outcome.

Or let’s say you have a project, you brought together some highly talented software developers, you have the money to pay them and the space in which they can work…and then you put one of them in charge of the budget, and one is out there doing sales, and another is making PowerPoint slides to show your investors. Not good. What was the point of getting all that talent together if you are going to use it to do the non-software developing tasks?

In a government office where I worked I suddenly found myself in a strategic planning division that I had helped create. My supervisor, unfortunately, started out as the stereotypical government bureaucrat. He told us on Day One that we would probably have 2 or 3 meetings a week to take care of “administrivia.” I went back to him later and suggested that from now on, his purpose in life was to take care of the administrivia so the rest of us could focus on what we had been hired to do. He was already slipping into the same bureaucratic mode that we had been created to get out of. I suggested to him that all I really needed from him was a “lane” in which I would work and the resources to get my job done, and if he could take care of that guidance and that resource management, I would give him the best product possible. He did not entirely understand that, but at least we went down to one 1-hour meeting at the start of each week.

So yes, there is a role for management, an important role at that. If you cannot get the resources your people need, and if you cannot oversee those resources, you are wasting a lot of talent. Leadership is all about creating a goal and the path to get there, but management gives you the tools to do it.

Anyone who says they are “a leader, NOT a manager,” probably is not either one.