It is no secret that I like to draw a clear (if somewhat graduated) delineation between management and leadership. In a previous piece on the topic, I summarized the difference as follows:
Managers tell and – under the best of circumstances – demonstrate what to do and how to do it. Leaders, on the other hand, model and make us believe in why we do these things.
The manager-leader continuum, therefore, features specific and (proto)typical actions and behaviors that further differentiate one from the other: While managers instruct, show, and (more or less effectively) communicate what is to be done and how, leaders model desired behaviors, attitudes, and dispositions and make us believe in the Why of our work.
What I have come to understand since I wrote that piece is that there are crucial underlying mindsets based on specific assumptions. And these mindsets differ vastly between those who choose to lead and those who continue to manage:
The Managerial Mindset
- Employees must be told what to do and how best to do their work to meet pre-determined outcomes and benchmarks (see McGregor’s Theory X).
- Work and employment are fundamentally transactional: employees are primarily motivated by money in exchange for labor.
- Workers are classified by their title, job function, and place in the hierarchy, which also determines their purpose and value to the organization.
- Work focuses on tasks, predictable processes and procedures, and adhering to established workflows: the manager’s job is to ensure these are followed.
- Interpersonal relationships and employee well-being are secondary or altogether unimportant.
- Innovation is often not in the manager’s best interest as it might upset hierarchies and bureaucracies and make the manager (look) incompetent or obsolete.
- For most managers, the organization is essentially a “machine” that amounts to the sum of its parts, that is, workers and their functions. When employees fail, leave, or do not perform as expected, they can and will easily be replaced.
- Succession planning is mainly absent and considered unnecessary as there will always be a steady supply of workers to replace those lost.
- Promotion and advancement are based on conformity, individually meeting and exceeding targets or benchmarks, and political maneuvering.
The Leadership Mindset
- Employees are naturally curious and wish to contribute meaningfully to organizational outcomes. As such, they need to understand the purpose of their work so they can continuously improve on achieving organizational and professional goals (see McGregor’s Theory Y).
- Work and employment rest on a foundation of both transferable and technical skills, personality, and an employee’s ability to apply their authentic selves to the organization. Therefore, employees are primarily motivated by purpose and a sense of contributing to the greater good.
- Workers are characterized by their innovative potential, ability to contribute to team efforts, participation in collective sensemaking, and co-creation of meaningful outcomes.
- Work focuses on building trusted relationships, collaboration, and finding new ways to tackle increasingly complex challenges; the leader’s job is to support their teams and individual contributors by building innovative capacity, meeting their individual needs for learning and growth, and providing maximum autonomy for employees to do the best work possible.
- The leader’s task is sparking, supporting, and maintaining meaningful innovation driven by their teams. They demonstrate their worth by bringing out the best in their employees, encouraging out-of-the-box thinking, experimenting with new ways of doing the work and leveraging and modifying existing organizational structures, processes, and workflows for the benefit of their teams.
- Leaders sincerely appreciate their organization as a living, breathing, complex, and adaptive ecosystem comprised of human beings with their unique professional and personal relationships, skill sets, histories, aspirations, and creative potential. Therefore, the organization is much more than the sum of its parts: It is capable of achieving exponentially more due to the emergent social and knowledge transfer dynamics that create the capacity to grow beyond the limitations of the individual.
- When an employee fails or does not perform as expected, leaders seek to provide support and resources to help employees learn, grow, and thrive. Should employees leave the organization or be reassigned, leaders understand the potential impact of their absence on the social, relational, and knowledge transfer networks.
- Succession planning is an integral part of the organizational leadership structure and promotes the retention of talent. Promotion and advancement are driven by the organization’s constantly changing needs and an employee’s evolving interests, skills, agility, innovative potential, aspirations, and accomplishments as part of a team effort.
Some readers may criticize the above description of the Managerial Mindset as bleak, dehumanizing, and unnecessarily pessimistic, while the Leader’s Mindset may come across as almost utopian.
I acknowledge that reality is rarely this clear-cut. I would also point out that management and leadership lie on a continuum, with both occupying extreme ends of the spectrum. After all, we are talking about mindsets and internal lenses that do not necessarily reflect the realities in any given organization or institution – and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
These assumptions can – and will – certainly be flawed. But the resulting mindsets do affect priorities, values, and work cultures, which, in turn, will impact behaviors that determine real-life circumstances.
Using the mindset descriptors above, how would you rate yourself or your supervisor on a scale of one (1: manager) to ten (10: leader)? And what mindset does your organization value more?