simplerich

“You can only lead others where you yourself are prepared to go.”
– Lachlan McLean
via Leadership Quotes on Sparkpeople.com

In recent years books have been trying very hard to separate managers from leaders, saying they’re not the same thing. Managers have been cast as bean-counters who keep the trains running on time while leaders were the trail-blazing mavericks that break new ground and boldly go where no one has gone before with throngs of adoring masses scurrying along behind them. Leaders are lantern-jawed while managers had, I believe, a slight squint and rarely looked up from their to-do lists other than to check the time clock to make sure nobody hit over time. That’s the trend in the books that I was seeing.

I don’t agree with it. I believe a great manager is also a leader, and the really poor managers out there aren’t leaders. I believe it’s possible to be both. I also believe it’s hard to be both. But if management were easy everybody would be doing it right? Look around, you can see places where everybody IS trying to manage. Those are places with lots of highly qualified people who have a manager who is not leading. Managers who don’t provide leadership, real leadership, not just the “Next Action is…” type leadership, are obvious within minutes of dealing with them.

Managers who are leaders inspire their employees to greater heights than they could get alone or with a manager that isn’t a leader. Leaders need to set the example and live it and do it every minute of the day. Their lives need to be congruent to the values they espouse at work. If they talk about responsibility at work but they’re unable to drive due to losing their license they aren’t leading from the heart, they’re leading from the mouth, and people can tell the difference. Leaders who lead from the heart, who lead from the front and go where they want their people to go are leaders that are followed to amazing lengths.

Management is a calling and leadership is too. Finding the rare individual who has a calling for both is really tough. Teaching the rote mechanics of management can be done. But if that’s all the manager has they won’t inspire. They won’t inspire other people to want their job so they can transfer or promote up. They’ll just slog their way through the day and so will their employees. Finding a manager with the spark to not only do the checklist, but inspire their employees to help develop new ways of doing things, faster, better, more efficient ways of doing things, that’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

A crew that talks about their manager as someone they like and are great friends with is OK. But finding a crew that describes their manager as someone they want to be like, that they want to appreciate their work, that they want to impress, and that they are impressed by, those are managers who are also leaders. They’re not buddies and friends, but something more.

As a manager of managers I love finding a leader in a management position. My job just got much easier when I encounter those people. I can aim them at a target and get out of the way. It’s not that easy I still get to play course correction type behavior, but I don’t find myself behind the bus pushing. Managers who are not leaders can be good as managers, they do keep the trains running on time, but they don’t tend to GO anywhere. The store will stay where it is and hold the line forever. These managers won’t make mistakes. They won’t forget deadlines or forget to file paperwork. They’ll chug along, cranking out widgets and being as reliable as a German car on the autobahn. That’s the type of manager I think that is sometimes belittled as “just a manager.” These types of managers are the kind I find myself behind pushing more often than not. But don’t write them off. If we as managers of managers are to be leaders we have to lead them too, not just the easy ones.

I don’t mean to write off these “just a manager” managers as some of them need only see an example to be inspired to learn to become leaders. Some have never seen a good example of what a leader can be and are afraid to take risks and so they stick to their lists and doing what they are told. Some, when allowed to be leaders, encouraged to be leaders, and they’re shown how leadership is accepted and expected will develop the taste for it and the desire for it. That’s a hugely rewarding part of my job. When I find a manager who will make that leap from “just a manager” to a manager who is also a leader who inspires their crew together we can storm the gates of any challenge. I suspect that when the dust settles from this economic mess we’ll find the places that did the best will have managers who were leaders at the helm. And places who didn’t encourage leadership in their employees will have lost out. The world’s gotten too flat for one centralized leadership monolithic culture to survive for long. That’s not nimble enough to react fast enough to today’s market.

The “You can only lead others where you yourself are prepared to go.” by Rich Griffith, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.