What Leaders Really Do
Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think. Leadership isn’t mystical and mysterious. It has nothing to do with having “charisma” or other exotic personality traits. It is not the province of a chosen few. Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it. Rather, leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action. Each has its own function and characteristic activities. Both are necessary for success in today’s business environment. Management is about coping with complexity. Its practices and procedures are largely a response to the emergence of large, complex organizations in the twentieth century. Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change. Part of the reason it has become so important in recent years is that the business world has become more competitive and more volatile. More change always demands more leadership. Most U.S. corporations today are over-managed and under-led. They need to develop their capacity to exercise leadership. Successful corporations don’t wait for leaders to come along. They actively seek out people with leadership potential and expose them to career experiences designed to develop that potential. Indeed, with careful selection, nurturing, and encouragement, dozens of people can play important leadership roles in a business organization. But while improving their ability to lead, companies should remember that strong leadership with weak management is no better, and is sometimes actually worse, than the reverse. The real challenge is to combine strong leadership and strong management and use each to balance the other.
The Idea in Brief
The most pernicious half-truth about leadership is that it’s just a matter of charisma and vision—you either have it or you don’t. The fact of the matter is that leadership skills are not innate. They can be acquired, and honed. But first you have to appreciate how they differ from management skills.
Management is about coping with complexity; it brings order and predictability to a situation. But that’s no longer enough—to succeed, companies must be able to adapt to change. Leadership, then, is about learning how to cope with rapid change.
How does this distinction play out?
The Idea in Practice
Management and leadership both involve deciding what needs to be done, creating networks of people to accomplish the agenda, and ensuring that the work actually gets done. Their work is complementary, but each system of action goes about the tasks in different ways.
1. Planning and budgeting versus setting direction. The aim of management is predictability—orderly results. Leadership’s function is to produce change. Setting the direction of that change, therefore, is essential work. There’s nothing mystical about this work, but it is more inductive than planning and budgeting. It involves the search for patterns and relationships. And it doesn’t produce detailed plans; instead, direction-setting results in visions and the overarching strategies for realizing them. Example:
In mature industries, increased competition usually dampens growth. But at American Express, Lou Gerstner bucked this trend, successfully crafting a vision of a dynamic enterprise.
The new direction he set wasn’t a mere attention-grabbing scheme—it was the result of asking fundamental questions about market and competitive forces.
2. Organizing and staffing versus aligning people. Managers look for the right fit between people and jobs. This is essentially a design problem: setting up systems to ensure that plans are implemented precisely and efficiently. Leaders, however, look for the right fit between people and the vision. This is more of a communication problem. It involves getting a large number of people, inside and outside the company, first to believe in an alternative future—and then to take initiative based on that shared vision.
3. Controlling activities and solving problems versus motivating and inspiring. Management strives to make it easy for people to complete routine jobs day after day. But since high energy is essential to overcoming the barriers to change, leaders attempt to touch people at their deepest levels—by stirring in them a sense of belonging, idealism, and self-esteem. Example:
At Procter & Gamble’s paper products division, Richard Nicolosi underscored the message that “each of us is a leader” by pushing responsibility down to newly formed teams. An entrepreneurial attitude took root, and profits rebounded.
Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think. Leadership isn’t mystical and mysterious. It has nothing to do with having “charisma” or other exotic personality traits. It is not the province of a chosen few. Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it.
John P. Kotter is a best-selling author, award winning business and management thought leader, business entrepreneur and the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at Harvard Business School. His ideas, books, and company, Kotter, help people lead organizations in an era of increasingly rapid change.
What Leaders Really Do
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