Very often, in discussions on leadership, someone will use the word "manage." Invariably this leads someone to erupt, "I'm not a MANAGER. I'm a LEADER!," or something along those lines. My suggestion: relax.
Yes, it's true: management and leadership are two different things. But management is part of successful leadership. Every manager may not be a leader, but every leader needs to be a manager.
Leadership is about people. It's about getting them to do what you want them to do and having them think it's their own idea. It's about helping them motivate themselves. It's about giving them a vision of the future and taking them down the best path. Leadership is, frankly, much more interesting than management (for most people, anyway).
Management, on the other hand, is about...stuff. It's about resources, like time, money, or office space. It can also be about people, in the sense of people as resources. Largely, it's about overseeing the process rather than the final product. Sometimes it doesn't seem as exciting or sexy as leadership (Is leadership sexy? That's a subject for another post.) but if you don't do it right, even the best leader will fail.
Why? Well, consider a situation where you've brought together all the right people, you have a common vision, everybody's motivated to make it work, and all of you are excited. Then, you don't pay them. The fact that you got these people all excited about something new means nothing if they leave because they can't feed themselves. Or let's say you have everyone all motivated to move forward on a project, but you've only got one week in which to do three weeks of work. Ooooooh, bad scheduling...and ultimately, a bad outcome.
Or let's say you've got a project, you've brought together some highly talented software developers, you have the money to pay them and the space in which they can work...and then you put one of them in charge of the budget, and one is out there doing sales, and another is making PowerPoint slides to show your investors. Not good. What was the point of getting all that talent together if you're going to use it to do the non-software developing tasks?
In one government office I suddenly found myself in a strategic planning division that I'd helped create. My supervisor, unfortunately, started out as the stereotypical government bureaucrat. He told us on Day One that we'd probably have 2 or 3 meetings a week to take care of "administrivia." I went back to him later and suggested that from now on, his purpose in life was to take care of the administrivia so the rest of us could focus on what we'd been hired to do. He was already slipping into the same bureaucratic mode that we'd been created to get out of. I suggested to him that all I really needed from him was a "lane" in which I'd work and the resources to get my job done, and if he could take care of that minimal guidance and that resource management, I'd give him the best product possible. He didn't entirely get it, but at least we went down to one 1-hour meeting at the start of each week.
So yes, there's a role for management, an important role at that. If you can't get the resources your people need, and if you can't oversee those resources, you're wasting a lot of talent. Leadership is all about creating a goal and the path to get there, but management gives you the tools to do it.
Anyone who says they're a leader, NOT a manager, probably isn't either one.
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