FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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Why management and leadership are two sides of the same coin

Why management and leadership are two sides of the same coin

“I’LL BE your coach, I won’t be your friend. If you need one of those, take it up with Doc or Coach Patrick.” - Herb Brooks, winning coach of the 1980 USA men’s Olympic ice hockey team

We all probably heard the phrase “Employees don’t leave their organisations; they leave their managers”. And another classic complaint we often hear from our employees is that “we don’t want a manager, we want a leader”. We can all admit to some truth in these two statements. After all, we have all bitched and moaned about our managers at some point in time in our careers. This does however casts a dark connotation on the word “manager”, while at the same time it casts a positive light on the word “leader”. Are managers really to blame when things go wrong in the team? Are managers important or required? Maybe we just need leaders.
Before proceeding any further, let’s define what is leadership and management. A leader is someone who utilises his strengths, is full of energy and passion, nurtures relationships, is focused and leads with purpose. While a manager is someone who is a subject matter expert. He or she is tasked with getting things done. A manager uses skills such as planning, organising and controlling to be effective. Now to answer our question, organisations need both leader and manager. That’s right. According to Globe, a longitudinal research study of leadership effectiveness showed that management excellence was just as visionary leadership (Strategic Leadership Across Cultures 2014). 
So why are managers always the first culprit for when something goes wrong. It’s because they are either using leadership or management and not both. Often talented employees are rewarded by getting promoted to manager level. They are promoted for their excellent technical skills. 
But in the new manager role, these employees need to rely on managerial skills to get things done. And rarely are these front-line managers trained on leading and managing the team. When things start to go wrong, these new managers start to micro-manage and sometimes even do the work themselves thus worsening the situation. Organisations can rectify this through learning & development program. Examine your existing leadership training programme. Ensure that both management excellence and leadership is part of development program for all levels even front-line, middle and senior management. 
Ensure that your newly promoted and recruited managers go through this program. Take Google for example, they once toiled with the idea of eliminating managers by adopting flat organisation hierarchy. But before doing so, it embarked on project code-named Project Oxygen to find out true worth of a manager. Surprisingly, effective managers with the right stuff “behaviours” were beneficial to the team. Now Its managers are trained on the right stuff. Some of these behaviours are associated with being a good leader and some are about managing team and removing obstacles.
Organisations need to realise that management and leadership may be different things but are two sides of the same coin. To be successful, we must lead to manage and at the same time we must manage to lead. 

SUVIT CHANSRICHAWLA, next-generation HR consultant under the brand Serendipity&Co.
 

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