The Manager-Leader Paradox: Navigating the Blurred Lines of Modern Leadership

Unravelling the Myths and Realities of being in Charge

Welcome to Coaching Contemplations, a newsletter full of ideas and insights that will help you equip yourself with game-changing strategies in leadership and coaching to succeed at work and achieve your goals.

Before we dive in, here are two ideas to share with your curious, ambitious friends and colleagues:

+ Before You Step Into The Office, if you're entering the professional world, this book is a roadmap of practical tips to help you avoid forming bad habits and feeling lost when challenges arise—tilting the odds in your favour for career success.

+ RYse Journal, a self-coaching journal for mastering the behaviours to motivate yourself and succeed at work.

Managers and Leaders. Are they the same thing or different?

For anyone embarking on a people management career, it is essential to understand the core managerial and leadership characteristics and skills that have the most impact. Unfortunately, many management and leadership competency frameworks used within financial and professional services have become a wish list of desirable traits and behaviours. A psychologist friend highlighted this point recently when he mentioned how happy he was not to be a people manager, "...as it must be so exhausting. Good managers must be experts in so many areas. They must be:

• Courageous and vulnerable

• Authentic and also conform by adopting the workplace culture

• Confident and humble

• Able to predict the future

• Supportive and challenging

• A work and life balancer extraordinaire

• Have an infinite mindset, but also be resource-conscious

• A coach, friend, and therapist

• And know 100+ styles of motivating their teams."

This unrealistic list powerfully reinforces that being a first-time manager can be impossible without the appropriate knowledge and training. Otherwise, derailment is highly likely, as stakeholder expectations drag the new manager from pillar to post.

Understanding what is meant when people say management and leadership benefits anyone in a managerial role. It helps avoid confusion caused by the latest popular "research-based" insights that routinely trigger cognitive biases in the workplace. For example, insights from thought leaders such as Simon Sinek ("Start with why"), Malcolm Gladwell (the concept of "ten thousand hours"), Adam Grant (rethinking assumptions and embracing intellectual humility), Dan Goleman (the importance of emotional intelligence in leadership), and Amy Edmonson (the need for psychological safety in conversations) each offer valuable perspectives. While these ideas provide insights, they are too often taken out of context, misunderstood, or superficial knowledge that is then misused, often with disastrous consequences for the people around them. Also, let's not be naive; popular non-fiction authors always have books to sell, so they will always have a new set of popular psychology best practices in their most recent books.

Good managers are essential in any organisation, and both managers and leaders are necessary for success in an increasingly complex and volatile business environment.

One is not more important than the other, even though you will likely hear more about leaders and leadership than managers and management. Over recent years, no doubt driven mainly by business schools and MBAs, leadership as an activity has attracted a higher status than management.

So what are they, and what is the difference between them?

Here we have snippets from notable leadership experts on the topic of Leaders versus Managers:

John Kotter (HBR, What Leaders Really Do (2003))

Leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action. Each has its own function and characteristic activities. Both are necessary for success in today's business environment.

Warren Bennis (On Becoming a Leader (1989))

The manager administers, and the leader innovates.

The manager maintains while the leader develops.

The manager does things right. The leader does the right thing.

Peter Drucker (Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1999))

With the rise of the knowledge worker: one does not "manage" people, the task is to lead people, and the goal is to make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of each individual.

Bruce Peltier, in his book The Psychology of Executive Coaching, provides the most straightforward comparison that I have seen of Managers versus Leaders:

Manager: controls things, keeps track of things, budgets and plans, organises, solves problems, staffs jobs and tasks, and is rules orientated.

Leader: creates things, changes things, finds and creates resources, creates an environment, shakes things up, aligns people, and is imagination-based.

Peltier states that

"If real leaders are rare, then real leaders with good management skills are even rarer."

Perhaps approaching this question of differences from another perspective and asking, "What is a manager's output?" will provide more clarity. Andrew Grove in High Output Management states:

The manager's output = the output of their team

It sounds to me a lot like leadership, which I condense down to:

Leadership is about effectively motivating and influencing others to deliver collective goals over their personal ones.

And so we arrive at a confession.

In the past, I have been guilty of falling into the trap of binary bookends—either or thinking—when it comes to managers and leaders. However, I now use the terms manager and leader interchangeably because I align with Mintzberg's view that:

"Management without leadership is sterile; leadership without management is disconnected and encourages hubris."

Henry Mintzberg (Managers not MBAs)

I have seen both sterile and disconnected bosses in the workplace throughout my career. A sterile boss is likely to be overly transactional and numbers-focused. Completing the assigned task will be their only concern, and the people are a means to an end. The disconnected boss will never get their hands dirty and won't have a feel for what is going on as they are too busy flitting from back-to-back meetings with other important people.

That is why I feel Mintzberg gets to the crux of the topic with the following statement.

"The best managers have to lead while the best leaders also manage."

Management and leadership are interchangeable and, as more experienced managers learn, also context-specific.

📫 - A quote that I am currently pondering

"An expert is someone who doesn't want to learn anything new because then they wouldn't be an expert."

Harry Truman (33rd US President)

🧾 - An absorbing and insightful (short) read

Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us - link.

Reading this article made me immediately revisit Planck's Principle: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

🤔 - If you did have the answer to this question, what would it be?

What are you pretending not to know?