The Skills That Separate Managers From Leaders

Research & Sources / Corporate Professional Growth

A good gardener keeps a garden healthy: watering, weeding, pruning, making sure everything grows well today. An architect does something else: they imagine a house that does not exist yet and convince others to help build it. Both are skilled. Managers are often gardeners. Leaders also need to be architects.

Management and leadership are different

John Kotter of Harvard Business School described the difference clearly. Management copes with complexity: planning, budgeting, organising, controlling, solving problems. Leadership copes with change: setting a direction, aligning people behind it, motivating and inspiring them.¹

Neither is better. Organisations need both. A company with leadership but no management is exciting chaos. A company with management but no leadership runs smoothly towards irrelevance.

The skills that make the difference

Setting direction. Managers execute plans. Leaders help decide where to go. That means looking ahead, understanding the bigger picture and making choices about what not to do.

Communicating a picture. Andrew Carton and colleagues found that leaders who describe their vision in concrete, image-like language get better team performance than those who stay abstract.²

Aligning people. Getting many people, often across departments, to move in the same direction. This takes influence, not just authority.

Coaching and developing others. Google’s research on great managers found coaching to be one of the most important behaviours.³ Leaders grow other people, not only results.

Leading change. Kotter’s research on transformation found that change efforts often fail because of too little urgency and too little communication of the vision.⁴ Leaders make the case for change and keep repeating it.

From manager to leader

• Spend some time each week thinking about the future, not only today.
• Explain the “why” behind decisions, not only the “what”.
• Build relationships beyond your own team.
• Develop at least one person who could one day replace you.
• Take responsibility for one change, not only for running things.

Keep your gardening skills

The best leaders don’t stop managing. They still care about the details that make things work. They simply add the architect’s view on top.

What this means for you this week

• Look at your calendar: how much time went to managing, how much to leading?
• Write down where your team should be in one year, in concrete words.
• Share that picture with your team and ask for their view.
• Coach one person through a problem instead of solving it for them.

Keep the garden healthy. And start sketching the house.

Sources

1. Kotter, J. P. (2001). What Leaders Really Do. Harvard Business Review. hbr.orgManagement copes with complexity (planning, organising, controlling); leadership copes with change (direction, alignment, motivation). Organisations need both.
2. Carton, A. M., Murphy, C. & Clark, J. R. (2014). A (Blurry) Vision of the Future: How Leader Rhetoric about Ultimate Goals Influences Performance. Academy of Management Journal, 57(6), 1544-1570. doi.orgVisions communicated with concrete, image-based language led to better team performance than abstract statements.
3. Google re:Work. Following the data: The research behind great managers (Project Oxygen). rework.withgoogle.comBehaviours of Google’s most effective managers: coaching, empowering, communicating, a clear vision; technical skill is only one of them.
4. Kotter, J. P. (1995). Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail. Harvard Business Review. hbr.orgCommon reasons change efforts fail, from too little urgency to under-communicating the vision.