Management is More Important than Leadership
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You’ve seen the “management vs. leadership” memes that people post on LinkedIn. They tend to recirculate every month or two. Typically, they have two columns of text comparing and contrasting the qualities of a manager (always negative) with the qualities of a leader (always positive).
“The manager drives employees. The leader inspires employees.”
Why is the manager negative? Because management is an endless source of derision in the business world. It is mocked in memes, in Dilbert comics, in social media posts. The general message seems to be, “Don’t manage! Lead!”
Why is Management a Four-Letter Word?
In a company of three hundred people, about fifty of those people are managers. Is it possible that all fifty of those managers are wasting company time and money? Is the work they do (the “work,” if you can call it that) really of no consequence or value? Would we all be better off if we had drastically fewer managers and more actual leaders?
Let me respectfully disagree. Actually, let me say something rather controversial.
Management is more important than leadership.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that an organization without good management will fail no matter how good the leadership is.
Too often in entrepreneurial companies – especially ones where the CEO had a bad experience in large corporate world - the CEO treats management like a four-letter word. “I didn’t create this company so we could have a bunch of paper-pushing managers!” As if management is detrimental to the organization.
The problem is that we have a misunderstanding of what the goal of management is.
Put simply, the goal of a manager is to maximize the results delivered by a group of people. Framed in that way, the value of management becomes clear, and mastering management skills becomes a positive force in any organization.
Language Is Part of the Problem
I suggest the problem begins with how we frame management.
People draw a distinction between “management” and “work,” as if “management” has nothing to do with “work”. Management is work. And management work is vital to any organization. Instead of creating a contrast between “work” and “management,” leaders need to talk about “management work.” It seems like a simple change, but the way we use language has a tremendous impact on our perception.
Compare: “I have to do some management” versus “I have some management work to do.”
It’s a subtle shift of language that makes a big change. When we begin to talk about management differently, people will begin to think of it differently. Instead of an alternative to work, it is simply another form of work—and a very important one.
Why Management Is More Important than Leadership
When I say, “Management is more important than leadership,” you might be tempted to respond, “Oh, that’s crazy talk. You can’t mean it.”
No, as provocative as it might sound, I think I’m onto something here. Ninety percent of all the people in any organization report directly to frontline managers. Those managers who are overseeing teams of five to twenty people have the first and more important interaction with almost every employee. If they aren’t managing well, the productivity of the whole organization suffers across the board, no matter how visionary and talented the executive leaders are.
Taken collectively, over 80% of the leaders in any company are first-line managers. If CEOs, shareholders and Board members continue to devalue management compared to leadership, this problem of poor management – and lack of maximizing the output of a team - will persist.
CEOs, investors, and boards who devalue management often wind up getting in their own way. I find that the frustrated executive leaders who view management with low-grade contempt are often themselves the reason why the company isn’t more successful. They don’t view management as a value-added activity, and this sets a tone throughout the entire organization.
The message that gets reinforced is, “Don’t just manage. Become a better leader!” As if doing away with the former would finally free the organization to thrive.
Frankly, the concept of becoming a better leader is so fuzzy that most managers can’t even wrap their heads around it without a lot of coaching. But the value-added activities of good management are easy to quantify—and they can be taught!
Andy Grove, CEO of Intel, wrote one of the best books on the subject, High Output Management, back in the 1980s. In it, he strongly champions the importance of mastering the discipline of management. As he says, effective managers increase the output of their organization by motivating their teams to attain peak performance.
So forget about your leadership for a moment. How’s your management?
One of the challenges is that we do not have a clear, actionable list of productive management behaviors. To solve this, I’ve prepared an assessment to help you understand the specific management behaviors that generate value. Here are a few examples:
Managers schedule and allocate work to maximize the output of the team.
Managers delegate work to maximize people's time and state of flow, personal productivity, and personal growth.
Managers hold others accountable in a manner that maximizes employee engagement by translating key performance indicators to individual quarterly goals and monitoring progress weekly against goals
For more insight on your level of management mastery or to assess a manager in your organization, click here to take the assessment.
Tags: leadership
