Episode #318: Managing Or Leading-Which One Are You Doing?

Last week I was teaching a leadership programme for new leaders and this key question of what is the difference between leading and managing came up quite a bit. They are not the same thing. Also, most of those so called “leaders” are only managing and not doing much leading. In Japan, we promote people into leadership roles running sections and don’t give them any training. They continue with this pattern throughout their career, rising, ever rising, but never doing much leading on the way up.

Managers are the Swiss watch mechanics. All the little interlocking wheels must be properly aligned, integrated, running in a well oiled fashion, not suffering from breakdowns or disruptions. The point is efficiency of process, in both design and execution. It does require adroitness to create work arounds, when things lurch out of control or to apply first aid solutions to an open wound in the system. A mastery of logistics and detail makes the job much easier. This would drive me crazy by the way. A leader wants more than that.

A leader must be a capable Swiss watch mechanic but also a high performance coach. Behind all of the star athletes and a good many of the top performers in business are their coaches. The elevation of tasks above managing are all about the soft skills. It doesn’t matter if you are the most talented software engineer if you are a dork and nobody wants to be around you, let alone led by you. Having tremendous current knowledge of the latest accounting standards changes is great but the people working for you don’t care all that much. They are more interested in, “what are you going to do for me?”.

Being a tyrant used to work a charm once upon a time. Instilling fear into people to get them to do your bidding, made leading pretty easy. Barking out orders like a pirate captain was good fun too. Yelling abuse at staff who made errors was thought to be morale boosting by showing others why they should be more careful. Life was so much easier.

I was listening to the global head of Abobe, Shantanu Narayan speak here in Tokyo last week. He made the point that all of his IP or Intellectual Property goes home every night and he hopes they decide to come back the next day and continue at Adobe. This is the reality, good people can be highly mobile and if the leader isn’t chiming in with them, they leave. In Japan, this dictum has now been extended all the way down to the highly mediocre. Even the very average staff are still needed, because the shortage of workers means it is very hard to replace them. Someone doing an okay job is better than the disruption of them leaving and facing the long, laborious and expensive process of identifying their replacement.

The retain component of the leader’s job in Japan is broken up into a couple of incendiaries. Salary will blow you up because people even more desperate than you will outbid you for staff. We had interviewed a candidate a number of times, things were looking good. On Thursday evening he was very “excited” to have the meeting the next day when the job offer would be made. Friday morning he told the recruiter that he taken another job. He didn’t even bother to hear my offer. We had been out bid by another company. He was good, but I wouldn’t describe him as brilliant or exceptional or any other descriptor you would actually prefer to the hang around the neck of a prospective employee.

Another incendiary is our communication capability. Busy bosses start to not communicate much with anyone, apart from during the slay of continuous meetings they are trailing through each day. This type of communication is very agenda driven, concise, business like and bereft of the human touch. “Where are we with the project”, “what are the numbers showing”, “are we on track to finish well”, “what is the run rate” etc.

Not much milk of human kindness in that lot. And that is the problem. We become very transactional, in a world where people have choices about the type of culture they want to work in. The work culture is created by the boss and how they speak with the team. How much do you know about what is going on in the lives of your people? Probably not much.

The third incendiary is our coaching chops. We didn’t get any on the way up because in our day, that was how it was. You had to work it out for yourself and it was a dog fight to the top. Today the high performance coaching aspect of the boss has become more important. Organisations realise a lot of value is trapped inside their people and can’t get it out because their middle managers are so lame. Innovation is usually best found at the coal face, by those closest to the action, rather than from the grey haired captains strolling around the bridge on the executive floor. Middle managers who are handing out orders like people possessed, won’t be asking any questions or brooking anyone else’s contribution or ideas.

Leaders are taking care of business and taking care of their people. They recognise that new communication and coaching patterns are needed. They look for creating cultures where innovation can thrive. If they are too busy for all of that “fluffy stuff” and their rivals are focused on it, then bad times are ahead. It doesn't come in a collapse, but like rust it just keeps coming, until you either change it or find the organisation can’t keep up anymore.