I felt annoyed during the week when one contributor to an online discussion described my differentiation of leadership and management as the “familiar one that most people talk about, perhaps with a few tweaks here and there.”

I think what troubled this writer was that I used the term “task” in connection with management, and he read this as me saying that leaders are people- and relationship-oriented while managers are task-oriented.

Wrong.  I don’t think there’s any value in dropping people into one or other of these categories.

For as long as there have been discussions about the leadership-management relationship, some writers and commentators have conceived of leaders as concerned with people and managers as oriented to getting things done.

We shouldn’t be surprised that this distinction has never really gained a lot of traction. Trying to separate leaders and managers on a single dimension is both simplistic and unhelpful.

But what I find frustrating is that the leadership-management relationship is often thought of as one and the same as the relationship between leaders and managers.

I think this stems from a long-standing and deeply-embedded cultural assumption that leadership is equivalent to leaders. Leadership is what leaders do. And what leaders do is leadership. (Similarly, management is what managers do…)

I prefer to think of leadership and management as different modes of action, and that individuals can potentially move between the two modes as circumstances require.  This raises the possibility that some of what (formal and informal) leaders do might actually be better described as management-oriented work. Similarly, some of what managers do might well be leadership.

Let me briefly define the two modes.

When we are in the leadership mode, we are assuming that the problem we are dealing with is not simply a technical one but that stakeholders have different perspectives; the problem is contentious. Some of the relevant stakeholder intelligence is likely to be hidden, implicit. Our challenge is to build shared understandings about what is real presently in relation to the problem, and about what would be a preferred future with the problem overcome.  Developing integrated understandings requires that we tap into the implicit dimensions of the problem, and that we deal with the associated threat and defensiveness. This implies that we intervene relationally. Essentially this means that we put the quality of our interactions at that time as prior to getting task work done.

At other times – and much of the time – we need to act in the management mode. When we do that we focus on what is explicit or tangible about the problem and on getting task work done. We draw – explicitly or implicitly – on the relevant authority we hold.

This distinction requires a bit of thinking about but it has some very practical implications, which I’ll explore in later posts.

It’s certainly not the same old, same old. So if you hear of someone distinguishing between leaders and managers you can be sure it isn't me!