Managing Leadership^®

An article about productivity, published recently in a fashionable management periodical, engaged in a tangential explanation of the putative difference between leadership and management. The interesting thing about this was, not the explanation itself, certainly, but the author’s offer, with manifestly pained resignation, of alternative terms for leadership (general management skills) and management (specific management practices). The compulsion this observer felt to yield, albeit grudgingly, to resistance to this false distinction is encouraging, even if this particular author then immediately reverted to type.

You undoubtedly know from your own experience that someone who wants to discuss with you leadership in contrast to management is going to come at you much differently than one who wants to talk about generalist vs. specialist managerial skills. The caution applies equally to any treatment of any issue in management, or about managerial styles. This, in turn, reveals that the definitions we are presented with at the beginning of many of these discussions have their pre-ordained conclusions engineered right in. As a result, they firmly direct the succeeding discussion directly toward those conclusions. Are you sure you want to be mere grist for this sort of mill?

Being forewarned about this is a big help. But together with not letting supposed experts hand-feed you definitions of management, you really should arm yourself with one of your own; this will assist you in maintaining a critical distance from which to better assess all the alternatives being pushed on you. The truth is, a standard definition of management as the administration and regulation of resources is quite adequate. As unadorned with pointless pomp and insidious exclusions as it is, it will help you better evaluate for what it is worth all the guff about inner-knowledge, heroic leadership, change agents, and the like that still stubbornly obscures the real issues facing managers today.

But better yet, ask yourself what your particular managerial concerns are. Are they related to group dynamics, decision making, or problem framing? Or perhaps with data assembly and assessment to help you and your organization better understand and respond to issues quantitatively related to productivity and competitiveness? Think about this a while, then visit the “Management Readings” link in the right column on this page, or, as mentioned in Wednesday’s post, the science, current events, psychology, social sciences, history, or similar sections in your favorite bookstore for titles that catch your attention while you have these concerns in mind.

To help you with your search and to provoke fresh ideas, be sure to regularly read the reviews of non-management books (read the management ones, also, when available) in The Economist or the Wall Street Journal. You will soon find a steady stream of such books forming a prominent and refreshingly productive part of your overall management reading.

We will be turning, now, to consideration of some of the core skills every manager should be constantly cultivating. Thank you for your interest in this discussion; we look forward to your continued visits.

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Please be sure see all the posts in this series!

1. Marketing Management
2. Defining Management
3. Understanding what we do
4. Understanding who we are
5. Faith or deeds?
6. Doing “certain - and fairly simple - things”
7. The fundamental requirements
8. The basic resource of the business enterprise
9. Making tasks meaningful
10. Making it matter
11. Setting the rules
12. Book Review: Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

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• Practicing Management: Understanding what we do
• Book Review: Management: Tasks, Responsibilites, Practices
• Practicing Management: doing “certain - and fairly simple - things”

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