What’s the difference between a manager and a leader?

When I was in Year 11 at high school, we went on a big camp in the lead-up to Year 12. Ah, late-night bunk bed whispers, shared meals in the dining hall… those things would have been nice.?

No. Ours was a week-long expedition over the mountains just south of Cooktown to clean up a beach* accessible only by boat or foot. We hiked with packs carrying our tents, sleeping bags, food, and water for the week.

The purpose of the camp was twofold: to clean up the beach, and to put a bunch of 16-year-olds to the test, seeing who rose to the occasion ahead of electing the college captains who would lead us in our final year.

This camp was when I realised anyone can be a leader.

It’s not a title. It’s not something that’s given to you. It’s not a popularity contest.

Being a leader is about your actions. It’s about how you work with, support and, well, lead the people around you.

As the rest of this story goes, a few weeks (and many, many showers) later, I was named as college captain. Apparently a week in the bush brought out the leader in me!

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Managers vs Leaders

Leadership and management aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, they’re complementary. It’s no good showing an amazing vision of the destination and motivating people to go on the journey if there’s no clear map on how to get there.

The great ‘management vs leadership’ debate is something that has popped up across many of my MBA units. The great John Kotter – one of the foremost voices on leadership and change over recent decades – explains the difference beautifully:

• Management involves planning and budgeting. Leadership involves setting direction.
• Management involves organising and staffing. Leadership involves aligning people.
• Management provides control and solves problems. Leadership provides motivation.?

Who’s the boss?

Most companies expect their managers to be leaders, but too often hiring and performance criteria are purely based on management KPIs – not leadership ones.

Where things often get sticky is when people are promoted or hired into management positions because they’re great ‘doers’, but they don’t quite have the leadership capabilities to go along with the management side.

It’s common – VERY common – for people to want management positions because of the things that come with the role: more pay, greater influence, status, the challenge of different work. But with management and leadership often so intrinsically intertwined, you need to know what you’re really signing up for when moving into management.

Being a ‘manager’ often means being responsible for other people. And people need to be lead – not managed.

“We lead people, but we manage things.” – Sam Chand

Can you be both?

If you’re one of the lucky ones, the person you report to will have both finely honed management and leadership skills. There may be a degree of natural talent to both, but as our good mate Kotter says, the greatest lie about leadership is that it’s about charisma and vision: that you either have it, or you don’t.

Leadership skills, like management skills, can be learned.

You can have a gun manager who isn’t a great leader. Or an amazing leader who falls short when it comes to the day-to-day stuff. It might look something like this:

• Good leader, poor manager: “They’re a really great person / have such a powerful way of seeing things, but they can’t actually help me with my work / we can’t seem to execute on their ideas.”
• Good manager, poor leader: “They’re really switched on and great at what they do, but they don’t seem to know what the future of the business / my role looks like.”

Even good leaders can be seen as too idealistic, disconnected from the day-to-day reality if they don’t have some management fundamentals. On the flip side, great managers can easily fall into the trap of micromanaging, stifling creativity, or balancing control and autonomy.

Here’s a very loose list of the things I personally think make great leaders and managers. There’s probably a venn diagram in this somewhere.

Traits of Great Leaders

• Visionary, big-picture thinking (and being able to articulate it).
• The ability to build or promote a culture that inspires and motivates people.
• Empowering and developing those around them.
• Excellent and engaging communicators.
• Resilience in the face of uncertainty and adaptability to change.
• Empathy and emotional intelligence.

Traits of Great Managers

• Excellent at planning, organising and delegating.
• Great technical knowledge – and a willingness to share it with others.
• Balancing speed with accuracy when problem solving / decision making.
• The ability to break down big goals and make them tangible.
• Monitoring progress and performance, and giving feedback well.
• Balancing expectation vs reality.

So, you want to be a manager

Think about the managers you’ve worked with. No doubt the best ones that come to mind have a lot of great leadership qualities as well.

And the not-so-great ones? Well, they often say you learn more from bad managers than good ones.

If you take anything away from reading this article, let it be this: it’s possible to be both a great manager and a great leader, but these are two different sets of skills you need to develop.

The truth is, leadership roles aren’t for everyone. It’s something you will never, ever stop working on. You’re going to have moments where you know you didn’t act like the kind of leader you needed to be, and you’ll have to own that. I know I’ve had my fair share of these moments, and I expect there will be plenty more to come.

I started as a manager in my mid-20s because I'm great at organising, problem-solving, and other things on that list above. Now, it's the leadership side I'm focusing on. It's a journey that started when I was 16 hiking to that beach near Cooktown – and it's not over yet.

My advice? Be the kind of manager you would want managing you. It starts with getting curious about yourself and being aware of the skills you need to work on to go from being the kind of manager who instructions to the kind of leader who inspires.

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TL;DR Management and leadership are two very different skillsets – and you can absolutely develop both. Managers keep things running smoothly, leaders set the vision and motivate their team to achieve it. Leadership is all about your actions, so aim to be the kind of leader you'd want to follow.

*Why did such a remote beach need to be cleaned, you ask? The movement of the ocean currents means plastic waste tends to find its way to this somewhat inconvenient slice of paradise. Here’s the hike in question. Funny, I don’t remember reading anything about ‘concealed crocodiles’ at the time…