Last year when I wrote Walk Your Talk: Take Ownership and Lead Like You Mean It, it was an interesting and introspective experience.
The book flowed so easily. This was content that I knew, used and taught regularly. I had seen the results first hand in my leadership experiences. And I had seen the principles work for my clients’ experiences. I did not doubt the material.
But I was nervous about stepping into the role of leadership expert. You see, if I am being honest, I am a great leader. But management takes work for me. And most people lump those two together. If you are a great manager, you must be a great leader. And if you are a great leader, you are absolutely a great manager.
That isn’t the case for many people. Leadership and Management are separate skill sets.
Leadership is more focused on building people and relationships. A great leader understands the people they lead. They are good at developing talents and maneuvering around weaknesses and faults in order to pull out great performance. A great leader is good at enrolling people. They can get others to follow. It’s all very lovely, until you get to hard conversations. But even in the tough talks, a leader navigates those conversations well because they are good with people.
Management is where people meets systems, reports, and productivity metrics. A manager monitors the reports each week. A manager knows where everyone’s numbers are at. A manager creates the improvement plans and watches to make sure that they are being followed. A manager runs performance promotions, tracks the increase in progress to decide if that promotion should be run again.
Can you see how different and yet complementary these skill sets are?
I think too often we beat ourselves up as leaders/managers if we are not perfect in both of these skills. The truth is, leaders build people and managers run systems. Knowing that, it’s easy to see why these skills don’t often coincide within the same person.
And the business still requires both! Fortunately, you can do both even when you are naturally good at one!
If you are a natural leader who needs to increase management skills, hire an assistant to provide the data for you. And then schedule time in your week to look at and analyze the numbers. Schedule time in your week for when you will talk with team members about performance. Sometimes leaders fill their days so full with people stuff, that they never get to that other type of people stuff. We need to inspire, and monitor!
If you are a great manager that needs to better lead people, schedule time in you
r day to chat. You need to plug in to your people and listen. People will tell you exactly how to lead them if you will take the time to truly hear. And I highly recommend reading Walk Your Talk. It will teach you the systems for understanding and communicating with the people.
Happy Leading!