The Best Managers Are Leaders — and Vice Versa

The difference between leaders and managers has long been debated. Classicists like Plato pondered about the various qualities of leaders and Niccolò Machiavelli wrote about how leaders and managers are different. Over his long career, organization guru Warren Bennis famously offered these observations:

Themanagerhashiseyeonthebottomline;theleaderhas hiseyeonthehorizon.

The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what andwhy.

Themanagerhasashort-rangeview;theleaderhasalongrangeperspective.

This all suggests that leaders and managers are different people. That view is misguided. Instead, we should want everyone — executives and employees — to lead when the time is right and manage when the time is right. Often, one set of challenges requires us to display strong leadership skills to provide teams with direction, whereas another requires us to buckle down and focus on execution. Rather than companies hiring people to handle the big picture while others sweat the details, individuals need to balance both skillsets, thinking of them as verbs (lead and manage), not as nouns (leaders and managers). Achieving this balance is the most important thing an organization can do. Otherwise, “leaders” at the top of an organization set its direction with no sense of the operational details, and

“managers” in the middle execute without inspiring, strategizing, or, when appropriate, pushing back.

To explore this idea further, over the last 15 years, I queried over 1,000 C-suite executives from 17 countries with a simple analogy, asking them to fill in the blanks: “Leadership is to ____ as management is to ____.”

Among the thousands of analogies produced, here is a small but typical sample organized into three categories. It illustrates the assumptions we often make about how one function interacts with the other:

Philosophy: subjective/objective; emotion/reason; soft/ hard; values/facts; romantic/rational; poetry/prose; curvilinear/linear; romanticism/enlightenment; art/science; qualitative/quantitative; picture/colors.

Action: strategy/operations; change/stability; interpretation/analysis; purpose/plan; tomorrow/today; continuous/discreet; compose/conduct; initiate/momentum; spark/oxygen; patent/production; compass/GPS; architecture/contracting; landscaping/gardening; coaching/training.

Relationships: inspiration/motivation; disciples/employees; passion/pay; release/oversee; transform/perform; person/place; individual/situation; one/many; mentor/employee; lead/follow; sprint/ pace; love/like.

It’s tempting to embrace these dichotomies and to adjust roles accordingly: Leaders are at the top of the org chart, and managers are in the middle. While I have no problem with the distinction between leadership and management that runs through the analogies, the problem comes from separating the two skills and styles into separate roles. CEOs need to manage, not just lead. Middle “managers” need the skills of leadership, too.

Bennis once said: Leaders “do the right thing;” managers “do the thing right.” The problem with the leader/manager distinction is right there in that quote: It is fine to make the distinction, but don’t pretend they are two different jobs. Doing the right thing is no good if you do it poorly, just as doing the thing right is no good if you do the wrong thing. Successful executives lead and manage — they don’t delegate one or the other.