The Fallacy of Separating "Leadership" from "Management"

I once worked for someone who explained the difference between leadership and management this way: “You lead people. You manage resources.” That was 30 years ago, and since then I’ve heard variations of that expression, or read it, dozens of times. Yes, leadership and management are two distinct disciplines. Try praising an income statement for showing a net profit and see if it motivates that document to improve itself! Or talk about a person on your team as though they were an inanimate object, and note the results.

Once while working for a smaller company than I had been used to working in, the CEO called a language penalty on me. I had asked a peer something like “What resources do you have on your bench that could be re-allocated to me so I can get this done?” The CEO said to me, “They’re human beings just like you, Dave. And you’ll be relying on them. Call them people, please.” This CEO, I would learn, was well-schooled on the difference between leadership and management.

Something about how I often hear people express the distinction between management and leadership has always seemed a little “off” to me. As in, “Sue’s role in the company is to manage our company’s database. But we didn’t hire her to be a leader.” Or “It’s okay that our Chief Revenue Officer isn’t a great manager, because his job is really to help lead by keeping our sales team inspired.”

When I hear comments like that, I think, “You’re accepting half a loaf!” Lately I’ve wanted to explore my thoughts on this more deeply. The following paragraphs, and a reimagined Blake-Mouton grid, resulted.

It started with noting that when I write about the kinds of people who would benefit from the kind of coaching I do, I have a tough time choosing whether to call them “leaders” or “managers.” I decided to give up on trying to pick between one or the other, and I started using “Leader/Manager” to refer to these people.

But why it was hard to choose just one word or the other? Reflecting on “why” led me back to the reason for coaching and mentoring: to help someone improve, to achieve a desired level of competence, often to go from “good” to “great.” This started me down the path of understanding my difficulty with what to call the kind of people I love working with – and why I like my solution.

I thought about the great leaders and managers I’ve ever worked with: an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel who usually knew the right course of action, but unless safety would be compromised, let his staff try their own ideas and learn from their occasional misses; a Chief Technology Officer whose “go-to” approach with staff that had run out of problem-solving approaches was to merely suggest an article or website that might lead them to a breakthrough; a Director of Finance whose habit was to understand the opportunities and challenges of every division in the company so they could offer wise suggestions on all sorts of topics in leadership meetings; a restaurant general manager who was driven by the parent company to give supreme emphasis to “the numbers” but whose response to an egregious error by a shift leader that resulted in closing the restaurant on a crucial weekend day, was to accompany the discipline with an inspiring pep talk.

I identified some common threads to many, many examples of what we might term “great leadership” – some of which I became aware of through the literature, and some from my own experience. Teams whose leaders built up their people while holding them strictly accountable for their goals generally achieved the results expected from them. These leader/managers understood, embraced, and vigorously pursued the mission that had been handed to them, while also demonstrating a high degree of what is often termed “soft skills.” They respected, nurtured, inspired, and even learned from others whether those others were part of the team that reported up to them, or not.

That led me back to the Blake-Mouton Management Grid, which has been around since 1964. If you’re unfamiliar or need a quick reminder, this figure summarizes it:

As one’s concern for the people they work with and through to get things done increases, as well as their concern to accomplish the mission they’ve been given, their observable behavior in professional settings moves closer to the upper right corner of the grid. According to Blake-Mouton, those whose high concern for the people is not balanced by their concern for mission accomplishment (or vice versa) are not likely to get the best results possible.

I found myself wishing that the Blake-Mouton grid said something explicit about leadership as well as management.

It was tempting for me at first to try and equate the “Concern for People” dimension of the grid with “Leadership” and the “Concern for Mission” dimension with “Management.” I don’t think that’s right. But what if the grid showed that a person’s concern for their teams producing results IN COMBINATION WITH their concern for people, position them as a strong leader?

I also wanted to clarify in my own mind, what a leader’s “Concern for People” should look like in this model. A surface reading of the label could lead one to think it means, “concern for their feelings.” This is not only an incomplete, but a dangerous understanding. While it is important to treat all people with respect and dignity, “Concern for People” from a leadership perspective also means things such as:

• Encouraging all to share their thoughts, listening carefully and not being dismissive of them
• Providing people with opportunities for professional growth and learning by challenging them appropriately
• Creating an environment where every team member feels safe to be their authentic selves
• Ensuring their team members’ clear understanding of the organization’s vision, values, and mission and how their role contributes to fulfillment of these things
• Approaching performance issues with curiosity rather than blame; finding root causes and encouraging problem-solving
• Creating and maintain a respectful and emotionally even-keeled work environment that helps people to focus when needed, and collaborate when needed
• Taking care not to over-burden people with work to the point where professional commitments crowd out other important aspects of their lives

When a Leader/Manager demonstrates all these qualities to everyone on the team, and communicates that these behaviors are expected of everyone, a type of “productive inclusiveness” takes root as part of the organization’s culture.

Anyone in the organization can behave like a great leader in ways that are appropriate for their experience and responsibility level. For instance, a junior accountant in their first job out of college can demonstrate their own leadership skills (and potential) during their first-ever “fiscal year end” flurry of activities to close the books and produce the financial statements by such things as:

• Listening carefully to their supervisor’s instructions and asking questions when something isn’t clear
• Asking to do a reasonable amount of extra work in order to gain experience and knowledge
• Staying calm and asking problem-solving types of questions instead of finger-pointing when a colleague does not get information to them by the due date
• When it appears to them that the numbers they’re responsible for don’t make sense, asking questions to learn why – resulting in either an error being fixed, or in learning something valuable.
• Letting their supervisor know when they are genuinely and justifiably too busy to take on extra work so that they will not make a commitment that they can’t meet.

These are examples of how leadership behaviors can help even a freshly minted young professional straight out of school to supercharge their journey. No position within an organization is beyond these concepts. No one works alone; everyone can practice sound leadership whenever collaboration with others is called for.

A Fresh Look at Blake-Mouton Through the Eyes of... Showbiz?

Blake and Mouton called their quadrant a “Management Grid” and labeled each quadrant to describe a management style. Here’s how I modified the grid in a way that expresses the ideas I see when I think more deeply about it:

Note that I’ve combined both leadership and management language into my re-imagining of the grid. And: I’ve matched the four quadrants of the grid to movies or TV shows you might be familiar with!

• Produce-or-Perish Management: Think “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Remember, first, second and third prizes are the Cadillac, steak knives, and “You’re fired.” And hey you! Step away from the coffee, you don’t deserve it!
• Impoverished Management: How about Michael Scott, anti-hero of the TV series “The Office?” He’s typically concerned for one person: himself! And the most important result he’s usually chasing is to cover for the Scranton branch’s poor performance.
• Country Club Management: Alec Baldwin’s character as the “Vice President of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming” in “30 Rock.” Whenever push comes to shove, his affection for his subordinates wins out over their need to improve.
• Team Management:?“Apollo 13.” Many tough problems need solving to get the astronauts back to Earth. It takes everyone working together with their variety of gifts and perspectives: domain knowledge and expertise, risk-taking, delegation, creative problem-solving, trusting each other.

The point of it all: A high degree of concern for accomplishing the mission PLUS a high degree of concern for the well-being of the people working to get it done, are twin dimensions of great leadership.

Flexible Leadership

There will be times when it’s appropriate for a great leader to temporarily emphasize one of these dimensions over the other in their outward behavior over the other. For instance, a great Emergency Room Supervisor might best wear their concern for the mission on their sleeve when the hospital is receiving a sudden rush of injured from a natural disaster; these moments may call for a series of rapid, decisive decisions in order to save lives with no time to immediately consider the more subtle impacts on personnel. We might see that same great leader “slow down the action” and listen deeply and speak thoughtfully, asking questions rather than issuing orders, 24 hours later when helping two nurses resolve a conflict between them. This kind of flexibility, when leaders can adapt their approach to exactly what each unfolding situation calls for, makes for the kind of leadership that galvanizes and focuses people in ways that make the team greater than the sum of its parts.