Confusion comes from the legacy way of doing business. It was started with self-made men and companies. Leaders inspired people and become their managers in some moment… this situation led to confusion and mixing both concepts.
Leader’s responsibility is to create team mission, discover goals to achieve. Effective leader brings direction (yes, Director role may come from it). Side effect of the competent leadership are: high team morale and sense of belonging.
Manager’s responsibility is to support team in execution of the goals set by leadership. Manager transform mission and goals into measurable targets and KPIs. Effective manager deliver goal execution in a predictable way. Side effect of the competent management are: smooth operations in team and effective cooperation with stakeholders.
I really like idea of the organisation growth described in “Traction” by Gino Wickman. It looks like this:
Important change I would do is to move Visionary (Leader) not on the top of Integrator (General Manager), but rather to a side as a leading partnership position. In my opinion Integrator should be dotted lined to Visionary, not straight-lined. It will help Integrator to filter unreasonable ideas from Visionary.
Whom we need more?
Lastly everyone saying about “more leadership” and “less management” is needed in our companies. I can not agree with this statement.
Leaders define their own direction and lead the team to this direction, – which is great. But what will happen if we have too much leaders? Probably we will come to the conflict, where we have too many directions for the same team. It’s still possible to survive if those directions are similar somehow… but what if directions are opposite? We will discuss it more in “War chief and Piece chief” part of this article.
Leader gives the direction to the organisation, but if direction is bold enough – we need more people to achieve it. To manage more people we need loyal managers, who will focus on cooperation and small improvements of the processes.
Managers will drive evolution, while Leaders will drive revolution. If revolution is big enough, we need much more managers to support the Leader.
But what if we have too many leaders in our organisation?
War chief and Piece chief scenario
We want our company to generate best possible profit and have two leaders: one wants to increase marketing and sales, to gain more market share; while second one is seeing sweet-spot in sales automation and reducing expensive sales and marketing headcount, while keeping the same or little bit smaller market share?
Achieving both goals in the same time will lead to frustration of the whole team. One of the solution will be the prioritisation, but we have to check if leader will be able to swallow it? So now we have to manage those leaders, to make sure, that they are in charge one after another.
Cherokee society solved this issue (read more), by introducing Great War Chief and Piece Chief. The similar approach we and also in Europe, and disrespect of this rule led to Roman Empire fall. Rubicon was crossed, and “the die is cast”… War Chief didn’t give back authority to pass it to Piece Chief… and it was beginning of the end.
In corporate life we also need War and Piece Chiefs. Some moment we need to grow fast and gain market share. Some other moment we need to keep calm and provide resource inventory and maintenance of internal processes.