Management vs. Leadership Part I - Are you a lazy manager?

Leadership is one of the biggest problems in business. Not because leadership is bad but because there is a lack of management leading to the leadership. I would like to share with you what I’ve learned from my business mentor and ActionCOACH founder Brad Sugars about the differences between management and leadership. Many of us are trying to find the golden goose of leadership. We’ve read the books; we’ve been to the seminars, we’ve watched the latest TEDtalk on leadership. If you go to the bookstore or go on Amazon, there are a massive amount of books on leadership but there are very few books on management. If we think about it, the last bestselling book on management was the One Minute Manager from the late 70s or early 80s. Let’s take a look and define what the differences are between leadership and management. Management is about creating competent and productive people. They have a level of competence, they know what they are doing and they know how they’re doing their jobs. If a company has a group of people that don’t know what they are doing, there’s a lack of competency or productivity going on in the organization, that’s a management problem or issue. Let’s flip to the other side of the coin and take look at leadership. Leadership is about creating passionate and focused people. If the people in the organization lack passion and motivation to do their job and they’re not focused on what they need to be doing, that’s a leadership issue. The challenge that I see most businesses have today is that the business might have been built very well from a leadership perspective, but because of the lack of management, we got people that are not good at their jobs, they’re not that productive. They’re passionate and excited but we’re not getting the results that we want. So how do we get the results that we want to get in our business? This is not brain surgery. It’s not actually that complex. What I have seen throughout my career if someone gets promoted to be a manager in a company they don’t get much management training. In most cases, they got promoted because it was assumed that they had those skills. One of the biggest challenges they face is the transition from being “one of the guys” to being the boss. In this day and age, the lack of management training is extortionately high. Now, why is that? Simply, it’s because businesses don’t give management training to their staff. Maybe management got a bad rap somewhere in the 90s or early 2000s. The mantra was that you don’t need to manage your people you need to lead them. It was like leadership was saying that management was a bad thing. To get the job done, we need competent and productive people if we want to get the job done in any business. We do need to learn management skills; we do need to understand what those management skills are and how they work. Let’s now focus on both leadership and management. Management is where we start because if we see negative behaviors in an organization normally it’s a lack of management. When there is a lack of management I see that they’re in denial of how competent they are. They think that they are better than they are. There’s a lack of responsibility, people are blaming others and there is no team cohesiveness. A lot of these issues are around lack of management. In reality, most people are just lazy managers. There I said it. They give someone a task but they don’t give them a timeframe or a schedule or plan to get it done by. Do you have a system to manage your people and tasks or do you just wing it? As a friend once told me winging it is not a strategy. Over the next few installments, I will be covering the 4 key of a good manager that you need to be focused on.

Steve Goranson has owned and operated the North Florida office of ActionCOACH since 2004. He is also a certified team engagement specialist and a social media educator with Luv4 Marketing.  Contact Steve to discuss how he can help your business in the areas of Team Engagement, sales & marketing, and operational efficiency.