Having read through the piece, I'm a little confused about why "leader" and "manager" are being conflated. They're very different roles. The former is a navigational role and the latter is a facilitating role.
Given the differing dominant archetypal personality traits required for those distinct modalities, it's unlikely they'd be strongly expressed in a singular person, and there's some reason to think they may be necessarily orthogonal. As their motivational biases are likely to be largely unrelated to each other.
Exactly. The distinction is that leadership is something that people voluntarily choose to give to you because they respect you. A manager is a role/job-title.
Many managers are some of the least respected people in their company, and thus aren't effective leaders.
not sure I agree. almost all the time one should lead through guiding consensus and people should proceed based on the fact that they think its the best plan at the time. if thats all the time, then great - you hired very well.
however that process can break down either because there aren't very convincing arguments either way about A or B, or because someone is being unnecessarily stubborn. at that point its fair to step in and say 'we can't make progress until someone makes a decision, and since i'm in charge, thats me, and its going to be B'
if someone was being stubborn, then as a manger you have to work with them to either work supportively with them to get them to be more constructive, redefine their role so they don't get in other people's way, or if those don't work, tell them to fix it or find a new job.
if a manager is just to keep track of vacation time and have motivational retreats, they aren't providing very much value. as a technical leader if everyone feels free to completely ignore the direction you're trying set without even justifying why, it can be hard to get everyone moving in the same direction.
What are you disagreeing with? THe parent said "real leadership should NOT rely on formal authority".
That is, they should be relatively orthogonal (and they certainly have been in my experience; people with formal authority no one trusted, followed, etc, and devs, even on occasion junior devs, who effectively led teams to success)
Interesting. I see them as naturally linked. Many/most organizations combine the two functions. And I think there's a lot to be said for doing it.
If you try to lead, you will create activity that needs to be facilitated. The person who understands the goal naturally has information about what help the workers need in achieving it.
For example, suppose your main goal has three major pieces to it. As a leader, you define the goal and the pieces, and you inspire people to work toward that goal. But this naturally raises practical questions like the relative priorities of each piece at any given time. Nailing down actual the priorities is facilitation because it helps people be most effective at working toward the goal. And who can best understand those priorities? The person who has the vision of the goal in the first place.
> As a leader, you define the goal and the pieces, and you inspire people to work toward that goal
'Inspiration' should be added as a trigger for workplace swear-boxes.
People aren't in work to be inspired to work more. The vast majority just want to earn a wage with the minimum possible effort.
In my opinion a leader is someone who shows those people how to achieve the goals the company has set in the most personally-efficient manner. Like following a guide through the jungle, he knows the shortest path and how to avoid the dangers. It's not inspirational it's just rational.
You could appoint a manager in the same jungle but he would just assign resources. "Bob, you're the machete man. Mark, carry these bamboo poles.". The team would then proceed to wander around the jungle.
You can appoint a college graduate as a manager but leaders need both domain knowledge and soft-skills. The military knows this, which is why a green junior Lieutenant is paired with an experienced platoon sergeant.
Fair point. Coming from the perspective of an early stage team (i.e. a startup), often the founder is the leader, and by necessity, he/she needs to manage the early team. That means working to develop some of the traits needed to manage AND lead effectively. Ideally, that founder will grow and be able to continue to lead/manage the team as it grows.
At most organizations I've been in, we'd struggle if the person in charge of a team (whether the CEO or a functional leader of say Marketing) was unable to both navigate and facilitate.
Yeah, I can see that. There are about a million random reasons given for having co-founders for early-stage startups, but the only one that's ever made sense to me is to use two people to manage this split. Either co-founders or a single founder w/ the first IC hire.
Leadership is outward facing, attracting followers by sharing a vision, inspiration, goal and working with the team to achieve that goal.
Management is inward facing, paying attention to the people you are responsible for, and knowing the right thing that's needed at the right time.
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Leadership is building the boat, management is making sure the boat gets built, on time, on budget, with the proper permits and inspections, training and safety gear, along with bi-weekly status reports to customers.
Some people confuse one with the other, but to me they're distinct and this is a rough sketch of how I see them as different.
This is an interesting idea and it certainly seems to make sense to me to see it described this way. I am curious, though, can leader be a manager, and vice versa? Or, are these roles so distinct from each other that they should be separate? Maybe these roles can't co-exist at that level because it's exactly the problem that leads to so many of the problems we discuss on this site?
I think that leadership skills naturally require a sharper focus than management skills (not to downplay the value of either).
There reaches a point where leadership requires you to take the manager gloves off and get your hands dirty. For small teams or small problems, a good leader/manager can be both one and the same.
However as the size of the team or problems grows, it becomes more difficult (think n^2) to tackle both issues at the same time with the same person.
Management issues (firing, hiring, expenses, budgets) and Leadership issues (decisions, progress, advocacy, examples) on a team of 5 may be doable by one person, but may be stretched with one person servicing a team of 15 or 150.
Or if there is a ton more problems in one area vs. others, the challenge of dealing with that problematic area can leave a gap on the "less problematic" areas, which eventually turn them into actual problems. That's my guess as to what people complain about the most.
This is a very abbreviated form as I'm heading out the door, but typically a "leader" is more likely to be lower on agreeableness than a "manager". It's a component of pushing boundaries or navigating challenges/obstacles. A "manager" biases higher on conscientiousness than a "leader" because their role as a facilitator is in no small part to make sure all the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed.
Likewise a good "manager" is probably motivated by community-building and completion. A good "leader" is probably motivated by the challenge and the path itself in addressing it.
Given the differing dominant archetypal personality traits required for those distinct modalities, it's unlikely they'd be strongly expressed in a singular person, and there's some reason to think they may be necessarily orthogonal. As their motivational biases are likely to be largely unrelated to each other.