What is leadership, and how is it useful in managing talent?

Next week is the International Leadership Week (#ILW23), hosted by the Institute of Leadership & Management. ILW23 is about?uniting?a?global community?of people who are passionate about?raising the standards of leadership for themselves and others.

So, in support of ILW23, let’s take a step back and consider, what is leadership, and how is it useful in managing talent?

This seemingly simple question does not have a simple answer. Even just the first part of the question, defining the word “leadership” is not straightforward. There are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are leaders. A google search for “leadership definition” returns 2,660,000,000 results.

To save you a lot of scrolling through the search results, the definition I have adopted for leadership is :

The act of starting a momentum towards a shared goal or vision and influencing and motivating other individuals to choose to join, follow or to act.

Leadership can include strategic problem solving, creativity and decision making to form the vision or shared goal. It is this visionary aspect that people most readily associate with leadership. It is perhaps also for this reason that many people use leadership synonymously with a senior positions in an organization. Vision, of course, needn’t be something enormous and highly strategic: everyone can have a vision, it simply requires the ability to imagine and plan for something in the future. This something maybe a small and simple change in our day to day way of doing things, or a highly complex sizeable transformation.

However big or small, visionary ideas alone don’t make a leader : leadership does not happen in isolation and it necessarily involves others, followers, by leveraging their intrinsic motivational drivers to embark, inspire, and encourage them to join the movement. As such leaders need to be empathetic and emotionally intelligent. Leadership, by its very nature of driving change and breaking with the status quo, should also accompany those impacted by the change through their initial feelings of denial, anger or fear towards acceptance, a sense of meaning and ultimately engagement.

Contrary to the idea that because of the perceived strategic nature of “vision”, leadership is only for those in a senior role, let's take this opportunity to reaffirm that leaders can sit anywhere within a company and are identified more by their abilities and not by a job title or a position in an org chart.?In my view, the most effective leaders are those that use soft power and interpersonal influence to gain followers who believe in and are convinced by them, rather than to the contrary because they have some sense of hierarchical duty to follow because the leader also happens to be “the boss”. All managers should be leaders, leadership is a skill required for management, however leaders need not necessarily be managers. True leaders often don’t have formal management authority. Taking informal leadership roles can be an excellent development opportunity to prepare for management, and will use many similar skills.

All managers should be leaders, but not all leaders are managers

So, let's bank the idea that management builds on and incorporates leadership skills and look at what it means to be a manager. Managers are formally accountable for both people and results.

Management is about driving the team’s activity, the output and work product, and its way of work. It is also about supporting the team to develop their skills and performance and to unlock their potential.

The manager is responsible for staffing the team, planning, organizing, and allocating resources and defining objectives to achieve specific delivery of output from the activity of the team. Whilst delegating the work, the manager remains accountable for ensuring performance?and that the team functions collectively together. It's also the manager who decides and communicates on remuneration and reward.

Over and above these formal responsibilities, first and foremost the manager’s role includes meeting the basic human needs of ensuring people’s wellbeing and security, but managers are also responsible for a sense of social belonging to the team, feedback and recognition of accomplishment and ultimately optimizing each individual’s development potential.

In order to drive performance and steer the execution of the team’s activity as a collective, and drive development of each member of the team individually, ?the manager needs to build a trust based relationship. Key to building trust is focusing on the needs of others rather than being perceived as meeting one’s own needs. A useful skill for managers necessary in order to build trust is active listening.

Whilst each manager will have a dominant management style based on their own personality and preferences, they need to adapt their interactions to the context and individual needs of the team members. Based on the individual’s ability and motivation the manager will need to support the employee using different techniques and approaches.

Whilst management does come with formal authority, how the manager uses their power will impact the effectiveness of their interpersonal influence. Leadership skills are crucial here, and the most successful managers will rely on personal power and leadership influence rather than their formal position. The seat of power is shifting, previously held firmly by the management, today we see a much more shared power structure, and managers are expected to use their?leadership skills and support development and not rely on compliance by simply "being the boss".

As such, the traditional hierarchical controlling role of manager is evolving and, to incorporate the people focus to the role, many organisations now refer to the role of managers as manager-coach to recognize the step change and their people responsibilities in supporting the team members collectively and individually.

Both management and leadership are essential to the success of an organization and are combined in today’s role of manager-coach.

It is essential to ensure that managers go beyond the activity focus of their role (decision making, budget and resource allocation, delivery, performance) and allocate their time and energy also to the people aspects (learning and development, motivation, potential, trust based relationships). ?By understanding the differences, but also the complimentary aspects between management and leadership, organisations can ensure that both roles are nurtured and fulfilled, which in turn leads to success and growth both for the business and its people.

Does any of this resonate to you? Do you agree with way I contrast leadership to management? Do you have a different view about how the two are defined? What about the term manager-coach?

International Leadership Week next week (20 to 24 March) is the perfect opportunity to centre the discussion around what leadership means to you, in your organization.

Here’s some more questions to get your conversations going :

• What does leadership mean to you in your day to day role?
• What leadership skills do you use?
• How can we develop and prepare the managers of tomorrow by encouraging and empowering the leaders of today?
• How do you identify who the informal leaders are in your organization?
• How does your organization ensure a focus on the people aspects of management by leveraging leadership skills?
• Are your leaders fully equipped to drive change, engage and empower people, and if not what can you do to support their leadership?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments as well to foster an online discussion !

Wishing you all an excellent International Leadership Week, I’d encourage you to sign up to some of the webinars and online live events offered or at least take the time to discuss leadership with your colleagues.

Alan Lambert, Fellow of the Institute of Leadership and Management, is an International HR leader currently working at the Corporate HR Strategy division of a global energy major and is a Linkedin Talent Voices Talent Advocate award winner.?