What is the difference between leadership and management? Is one more beneficial to a project than the other? Are they mutually exclusive?
Many businesses put too much focus on management and don’t devote enough time and energy to leadership, which results in failed projects, unmet deadlines, and unhappy customers. Knowing what leadership and management are and how and when they should be used will allow you, your team, and your business to grow and evolve.
Leadership vs Management
As the CEO of my own company for 23 years, I’ve had plenty of first-hand experience with management and leadership. But conventional definitions of these terms leave something to be desired.
According to the dictionary, they’re defined as:
- Management: The process of dealing with or controlling things or people
- Leadership: The action of leading a group of people or an organization
However, these dictionary definitions are only marginally helpful. They’re missing key nuances that are important to understand in order to know when to implement the right one. Allow me to offer my own definitions.
Management
Management is related more to tasks than people. To successfully manage people is to get those people to accomplish tasks. These tasks are usually well-defined, well-understood, and done often or repeatedly.
Management also allows us to monitor and measure progress easily, so we always know where our team stands. If we aren’t meeting the goals we’ve set for ourselves, we can tune the process, change the people, measure our progress, and try again.
Leadership
Leadership, on the other hand, involves pointing a group of people in a specific direction. Make a note of the fact that I said direction rather than goal. When we think of a goal, we expect to reach a finish line, and we can mark the goal as complete and move on. However, leadership requires us to extend further than the finish line, continuing to move in one direction as a team.
Unlike management, it’s difficult to measure results with leadership because we often find ourselves doing something we’ve never done before. In fact, we may even sometimes find ourselves doing something no one has ever done before. We, as leaders, may not have a complete understanding of everything we’re doing at all times, which means we have to be comfortable figuring it out as we go along.
Does that mean we throw caution to the wind, fly by the seat of our pants, and hope things turn out well? Of course not; that’s asking for trouble. As leaders, there are five main areas that we need to focus on to lead our groups in the same direction: common language, alignment, visibility, crowdsourcing, and commitment.
Common Language
First and possibly the most important area of leadership we need to focus on is the common language of our team. Often, when we’re taking on a new project or process we have no experience with, we don’t all understand the goal the same way. We, as a team, need to develop a way to talk about the project or process that not only uses the same words but that also leads everyone to have the same understanding, or vision, behind those words.
In my experience, the best way to create a common language is by making increasingly detailed representations of the topic or project we are discussing. In our software world, for example, that means describing the software in different ways, such as with user stories, prototypes, test cases, and more.
Only when we’ve created and are using a common language can we drive our team to make decisions and progress.
Alignment
Good leadership also relies on alignment, which refers to the group or team focusing on the same result or target. Not everyone has to share the same thoughts on how to accomplish a result, but they should all agree on what we are trying to accomplish.
Successful alignment is completely dependent on the common language. If our teammates or clients don’t mean the same thing we do when we describe something, it is very easy to “agree” on the words being used but not be aligned on the goal. Without a common language and alignment, we’re waiting for disaster to strike down the road.
Visibility
Next, we want to create visibility. Visibility into a project or process can show us what we are doing, how we are doing it, and the progress we are making.
Even with a common language and alignment, there is still the possibility for misunderstanding or even a situation where we’re wrong in our planning or execution. For that reason, and so we can watch for adjustments we need to make, we need a way to measure our progress.
One of the most effective ways we can create visibility and measure progress is by creating milestones, also known as target dates, for each of the items in our team’s plan. These milestones can act as markers and can communicate whether we’re behind, ahead, or right on schedule.
Crowdsourcing
Once you’ve established a common language, alignment, and visibility, you are well on your way to achieving a successful leadership model within your project. At this point, it may be time to take advantage of crowdsourcing, which is something I use often in my own business.
- Crowdsourcing: The practice of obtaining information or input into a task or project by enlisting the services of a large number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via the Internet.
Now that we are confident our teammates or clients are on the same page as us, we can look to them for help. How so? I suggest simply asking how they feel about the project. Do they believe we’re doing well? Or do they think we should be worried about our current progress?
By asking these simple questions, the group can give us a reading on our project based on their varied experience and backgrounds. This allows us to investigate possible problems early instead of waiting until they become a major obstacle.
In my past, I would ask for proof when someone expressed a concern. If they couldn’t supply proof on their own, we would create a way to find it. Now, with more time and experience, I realize those concerns are often subconscious. The person is processing the situation and may not consciously be able to describe how they arrived at that insight yet.
I have learned to trust those “instincts” as they are actually the result of finely tuned knowledge and experience that has become second nature. Compare these instincts to why teenagers have so many car accidents; the decision process to avoid an accident hasn’t become second nature and is not yet automatic for them. They have to think about it consciously, which takes significantly longer than being able to do so subconsciously. Let’s give that fast processor more respect.
Commitment
Finally, we have to integrate commitment into our leadership. When a person in our group or on our team commits, they are promising to complete a task regardless of the obstacles that may appear. They agree to put their egos in the back seat and focus on the success of the tasks they are committing to, meaning they would rather ask for help to ensure the team continues to win rather than hide struggles out of embarrassment.
One way to improve commitment is by committing to a date rather than estimating a number of hours it will take to complete a task. That way, you can always be sure you’ll have the task completed by the day given, even if the original estimate was incorrect. That’s how you can keep a project on schedule.
Hopefully, you now see that the true key to success doesn’t rely on actionable tasks but on the thought process of a team. That’s why leadership is dependent on thoughts, which cannot be managed. When running a team, a business, or a project, your people and their commitments to you and your goals will lead to success.
Whereas a dysfunctional team will fail even with a great timeline of actionable tasks, a great team will succeed even with an inferior plan or process. While management is important, leadership is the key to a great, successful team.