Manager vs. Leader?
The Line May Be Thinner Than We Have Been Taught
“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.” — George E. P. Box
I just got back from a leadership summit where I attended a breakout session on leading and managing people. The facilitator was great and really knew her stuff. She’s an HR consultant for a living, and this clearly wasn’t the first time she had stood in front of a room like this (although she got more than she bargained for in interactivity from this crowd—she had to race to get through her last slides). Partway through, she drew a line that I have heard drawn a thousand times ever since I started thinking seriously about leadership almost thirty years ago. That line is this: managers do one set of things, leaders do another. But she went a little further than I expected. The moment you start setting goals or talking about measurements, she asserted, you have stopped leading and started managing. So keep that out of your one-on-ones. Those conversations are for leadership, by which in this case she meant people development.
I wrote it down because it bothered me, and I couldn’t exactly put my finger on why. But after doing some more reading and thinking over the next couple of days, here’s what I landed on: If a leader’s job is to set direction and maintain it, how the heck is said leader supposed to know if anyone is actually moving in that direction? You can cast all the visions you want. But at some point, you have to look together at whether the thing is happening. That look requires something measurable. You cannot operate a healthy team, organization, or business on feel alone. And you cannot relegate the quantifiable to the “managers” and then go about “leading” with no reference to actual, measurable, deliverable progress. When you take measurement off the table, you have merely hollowed the conversation. You have left your people with encouragement and no way to tell if any of it is true.
The session went on, and the facilitator put up her next slide, which was a delegation framework. Something that a leader could use to delegate with an eye to build up an employee instead of just abdicate a duty they don’t want to do. I love the concept, and the framework is really great. There’s only one problem with it. It’s full of “management” tasks. Set clear goals. Clarify the outcome. Follow up on progress.
I don’t think she caught the inconsistency, and I don’t think anyone else in the room did either. But the model of good leadership in delegation utterly failed the model of leader versus manager.
Now obviously I think about this a little differently. At United Way of Merced County, where I work*, one of our core values is “Results-Driven Impact.” Now I work with a lot of non-profits, and I would say that the vast majority of them use the word impact somewhere in their mission statement. It’s a buzzword in the nonprofit space, a sort of icon used to produce a feeling. But the results-driven half is the part with teeth. It means that we measure what we do, we show our work, and we can prove the change that we create rather than just dreaming about it or doing a bunch of stuff and hoping it made a difference. That value runs (as a value must in order to be a value) through everything, from which programs we choose to start or keep all the way down to hiring. This includes regular, developmental conversations with our people. Measuring is not the chore we clear away so the leadership can begin. It is the leadership. It is the thing that makes any of our claims about impact worth believing.
So when someone tells me measurement belongs solely in the domain of management and should stay out of the room when you lead people, I can’t make it fit into my experience of good. The place I work has built its whole identity on the opposite claim, and it works.
This is why I included the George Box quote today. Models aren’t true or false; they are useful or not. And every model has an edge where it stops being useful and starts lying to you. The manager-versus-leader split is a useful model, especially to newer leaders who likely have less experience with the softer side of the calling. It helps that new supervisor understand that getting the spreadsheet right is not the same as helping a person grow. That is a real and important lesson, and I want to make it clear that I know that’s why this consultant was teaching it. But if you leave it there, if you push it one inch too far, to “if you ever discuss a number with someone, you’re not leading,” it breaks.
So here is where I’ve come down after a couple of days of reflection: Every manager should lead. Every leader should manage. These are two hands on the same job. The skill that actually matters, the one no management 101 framework will hand you, is knowing which hand you should be using at any given moment.
The person sitting across from you in that one-on-one needs both. They need someone who sees the person they are becoming and they need someone honest enough to look at whether the scoreboard reflects that becoming. If you only give them the first, you’re a cheerleader. If you only give them the second, you’re a dashboard. What they need is for you to be a person.
Practice
This week, walk into one of your regular check-ins with no agenda except to notice which hand you reach for. Most of us have a default. Some of us retreat to the numbers because the numbers feel safe and unarguable. Some of us avoid the numbers because we’d rather be liked than clear. Don’t try to fix it in the moment. Just make note of which way you lean when you’re not thinking about it, and write it down afterward. You can’t manage a tendency you can’t see.
Reminder
The model that helps you learn the job is not the same as the job. Hold your frameworks loosely enough to drop them when the moment asks for the other hand.
P.S. I keep thinking about that delegation slide. The contradiction wasn’t a failure of her preparation, she was more prepared than most. It’s that the categories themselves can’t hold the weight we put on them. Which is oddly reassuring. If even the experts can’t keep managing and leading in separate boxes, maybe the honest move is to stop trying and just do the work in front of us. If this one made you think of someone who leads with only one hand, send it their way.
*I work at United Way of Merced County. The views here are my own and don’t represent the organization.
Andrew, big yes to this. I can’t believe the amount of people who still use both terms interchangeably. They are fundamentally different. Thanks for sharing