OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: The Difference Between Leaders and Managers

In their new assignments, however, they needed to become leaders. In their new assignments, they were being asked to get results from people over whom they did not have hierarchical authority. They had to inspire people to change without the levers of hierarchical power. After assessing the situation, they had to use influence to get things done in the absence of any power to control or to sanction. They had to catalyze change rather than direct it. They had to build teamwork and collaboration among people who were or had been fighting each other.

The distinction between managers and leaders

What Boyatzis and McKee miss is the distinction between leaders and managers. They see Eduardo and Karl as successful leaders who burned out. In reality, Eduardo and Karl had never been successful leaders. They had been successful managers, occupying positions of authority and power, which they used to get things done. When they were faced with the ambiguous challenges of real leadership, i.e. the challenge of persuading people to change without hierarchical power, they lacked the necessary leadership skills. They apparently had no idea how to inspire change, to persuade people to act differently, to catalyze coalitions of collaboration or to resolve conflicts, without structured hierarchical authority.

How helpful is it to say that Eduardo and Karl were leaders who lacked emotional intelligence? It's true that in the examples as explained, neither Eduardo nor Karl demonstrated any understanding of the complex situations in which they found themselves. But even if they had understood the problem, did they have any of the behavioral skills necessary to deal with the situation? Based on the accounts that we have, would they have known what to say or do to change the situation? In effect, it seems that they lacked the basic skills of leadership. To call them leaders who lacked emotional intelligence is less apt than to make the more basic point: they weren't really leaders at all. They were people who had been successful managers, and who were unready for the challenge of leadership, to spark change.

How helpful is the concept of "the Sacrifice Syndrome," i.e. leaders working harder and harder and achieving less and less, until they burned out? What we have is not so much leaders burning out, but rather managers not knowing how to be leaders, and not surprisingly, becoming frustrated and failing.

Confusing managers and leaders

The confusion of leadership and managership is endemic in the vast leadership literature. In fact, Professor Bedeian in a recent scholarly article wonders "how many practitioners have turned to the leadership literature for guidance in developing leaders and have followed recommendations based on studies NOT of leaders, but rather managers that have been mislabeled 'leaders'". (Bedeian, A.G. & Hunt, J.G.: (2006) Academic amnesia and vestigial assumptions of our forefathers, The Leadership Quarterly 17 (2006) 190 205).

In fact, the literature on leadership is bedeviled by misuse of the term, "leadership".

In some studies, as in Resilient Leadership, leaders are thoroughly confused with managers, and are defined by formal position and, by extension, followers are taken to be individuals who directly report to them. Leading is thus treated as synonymous with holding a supervisory or managerial position, something that Bedeian regards as "lacking even simple face validity. Occupying or being appointed to a supervisory or managerial position doesn't magically make one a leader."

In other studies, leadership is a word used to mean the possession of certain personal qualities. These studies, which may well have their origins in the earliest trait-based attempts-ultimately futile-to identify leaders, seem to draw upon the notion that leadership springs from a personal disposition. Again, the idea that merely having a certain disposition causes other people to follow seems to lack even surface plausibility: whether you have influence as a leader depends largely on what you say and do, not just having an internal disposition.

Paradoxically, there are relatively few studies or books that identify leadership correctly as describing a category of behavior in which an individual acts in a certain manner, thereby influencing others to follow. Whereas the role of management is to promote stability or to enable the organization to run smoothly, the role of leadership is to promote adaptive or useful changes. Leadership is fundamentally about making change happen. (Kotter, J. P. (1990). What leaders really do. Harvard Business Review, 68(3), 103 111)

Boyatzis and McKee assume that anyone who occupies a position of authority is a leader and and so miss the critical element that leadership is about change. As a result, they spend little time talking about genuine leadership challenges.

Instead they focus on emotional intelligence which they see as comprising four dimensions:
· Self-awareness
· Self-management
· Social awareness
· Relationship management

Relationship management

Of the four dimensions, the main focus of Resonant Leadership is on the first three, with a strong emphasis on the self and becoming socially aware. We hear very little on the heavy lifiting of genuine leadership, i.e. relationship management in situations of change.

Yet of the four dimensions, it is only the fourth that is directly relevant to the skills of leadership, and this is precisely where the book is weakest.

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