Are you a leader or a manager?

Small note

Before we jump into today’s topic I just wanted to let you know that The ripple effect leadership team (me) is taking the following two weeks as their summer vacation.

This will be the last edition of the newsletter for July, following to come back stronger than ever and with new energy for leadership insights in August!

Before then, let’s dive into today’s topic - a tale as old as time - are you a leader or a manager?

Introduction

Becoming a leader is something to be proud of. Your skills brought you to this moment where a company or a group of people trust you enough to put you in a higher position of influence. Compared to some hard skills based tasks, your portfolio will now shift towards the fine art of soft skills.

Qualitative data suddenly takes a higher stance for defining performance. The way you spend your time has a higher impact for the ones around you than before. Finally, you’re holding yourself accountable against new expectations.

With a more diverse plethora of people being leaders than other jobs, having a spectrum ranging from presidents to building administrators, curating a realistic mechanism of auditing your performance is mandatory.

As a new person in this position, you may be driven to consider your work of less quality than what the reality actually is. It’s a normal behaviour for humans when they are put to face the unknown.

From a top down look, your responsibilities as a leader are to:

• set the vision for your team

• communicate the vision effectively

• empower individuals to identify with it and apply it daily.

Leading people versus managing work

Everyone around you will have different expectations about what should be your main priorities. The profile of responsibilities you have in a day differs and is continuously changing. That’s one of the best traits of leading!

We’ve already used the term leader and leadership in all our newsletters. By now you must’ve been wondering: “what’s the difference between leadership and management?”. The answer to this question caused many debates throughout the years.

We will be breaking down this question as scientists, and bring conclusions at the end of our experiment. Let’s proceed.

Objectives

Subject

Definitions of the two terms

Leadership is the creation of positive, non-incremental change through meticulous planning, vision, and strategy. People empowerment and adaptive decision-making also add up to the crucial attributes of leadership.

Management is all about performing pre-planned tasks on a regular basis with the help of their teams. A manager is completely responsible for carrying out the four important functions of management: planning, organising, leading, and controlling.

Managers can become leaders if they adequately carry out leadership responsibilities, including communication of good and bad, providing inspiration and guidance, and encouraging employees to rise to a higher level of productivity.

Where becoming a manager is a definitive step in your career, leadership opportunities arise at any step, irrelevant of their title or work setting, but rather more connected to a set of intellectual and interpersonal skills.

Framework

Rather than having a literal framework today, I will be presenting how I consider the two terms to be similar or different. The painted image should allow you how to determine which of the titles better matches your responsibilities.

Similarities between leadership and management

Scientifically speaking, we can identify clear similarities between leaders and managers. Both require establishing objectives and effective planning to meet them. Further, both ask for decision making, effective communication, and problem solving skills.

Irrelevant to the role, you should be able to identify problems, analyse data, come up with multiple solutions and weigh options. Moreover, your intrinsic motivation should be the improvement of your team and their created products.

Finally, having a genuine ethical spectrum and being able to be accountable for your own actions in order for others to gain trust in you is a mandatory criteria for anyone in a position of power.

Differences between leadership and management

In a conversation with a young manager, Vineet Nayar, a revolutionary author in the world of empowering people towards business success, has been faced with having to simply break down the opposing traits of leadership and management. In short, he emphasises three concepts:

1. Counting value versus creating value 

As a manager, one is driven to define their success by measurable data. Vineet uses the example of a diamond cutter. Only managers count value; some even reduce value by disabling those who add value. If a diamond cutter is asked to report every 15 minutes how many stones he has cut, by distracting him, his boss is subtracting value.

On the other hand, leaders sustain creating value. Delegating some tasks to your team while you add value by handling other tasks are leadership traits. By doing so, you are adding value together with the rest of your group. Leading by example and leading by enabling people are the hallmarks of action-based leadership.

2. Circles of influence versus circles of power

Just as managers have subordinates and leaders have followers, managers create circles of power whereas leaders create circles of influence.

The quickest way to figure out which of the two you’re doing is to count the number of people outside your reporting hierarchy who come to you for advice. The more who do, the more likely it is that you are perceived to be a leader.

3. Leading people versus managing work

As per our definitions, management consists of controlling a group or a set of entities to accomplish a goal. Leadership refers to an individual’s ability to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward organisational success.

Influence and inspiration separate leaders from managers, not power and control.

Final thoughts

Taking into account the aforementioned findings, I prefer to focus deeply on creating leaders. While managers need to be appointed, everyone can become a leader in their own world of work.

Leadership skills enhance any individual to become the best version of themselves, and achieve greater success. Today, you may have to be a leader in organising a friends’ meetup. Tomorrow, you may need to use the same skills to run a successful company.

The real power of leadership comes not from the title, but from building relationships, caring for the ones around you, and gaining trust from others.

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Quality content

Today’s quality content comes from Vineet Nayar himself. His work as a leader who is obsessed with making a real impact has become a real canvas on how to succeed in this role.

Today’s article focuses on giving you a new image over the topic of this newsletter. I am well aware that anyone with some interest in leadership has at some point or another stumbled across a “Are you a leader or a manager” article. As a firm believer in repetition as a tool for solidifying points, I didn’t mind putting in my two cents on the topic through this newsletter and other social media posts about it.

For a fresh taste, Vineet created some new types of managers that do not make it as leaders. He furthermore explains which leadership skills one needs to pay attention to so to avoid falling into one of these categories.

I think it’s a super fun and interesting read. I never expected to see peanut and manager as two words next to each other.

This is it for today! Thank you for reading!

Razzmatazz without the matazz.