Management vs Leadership... and what it means for how you frame your own work

There are two most transformative years of my professional life. The most recent occurred in 2019 and I've begun calling it my "all-in year"; toward the end of my MBA, as I was earning my PMP and just before I left higher ed to start my project management consultancy, I started a process of applying literally every skill and concept I could think of to my work as a Student Activities coordinator. There is much, MUCH more I could say about that, and we will get to it in good time, but for now I want to remember that first most transformative year.

My first masters degree, the one that taught me everything I know about the underlying skills of reading and interacting with people in ways that empower and motivate them to change, was a counseling degree. At the end of a counseling degree, you spend a year on your practicum and internship... and I was blessed with the most incredible internship supervisor.

I've talked about him before, so parts of him might seem familiar: he was a full-time counselor at the community college I interned at – which I'd sought out because the model at many community colleges combines personal counseling, family counseling, and career counseling, and I wanted all of that – so he was already doing a lot there, and he was a counseling faculty member at a nearby university and he maintained a private practice. This man lived and breathed for the profession.

(In retrospect this is one of the ways we diverge, professionally, and isn't it a gift to grow to see even your most powerful mentors as simply people – even if they are also people who had so much to teach you – and not as prescriptions to follow?)

On Fridays, we took our lunches outside and ate together under a massive oak tree. Outside the (substantial) formal supervision process, he also made time to simply spend thirty minutes together talking about our weeks, what I was learning, what we were each reading, etc. He dropped so many bits of wisdom under that oak tree that I still come back to today, and one of them lodged itself so deeply in the core of my professional identity that if you've spent any time with me at all you've likely heard me say it:

An expert is someone who's mastered the basics.

Every time I'd try to get fancy with a new technique, he'd rein me in and ask for a thorough tally of how I'd performed the microskills I'd learned all the way back in my first semester. (This, of course, felt like a lifetime ago to me at the time; reminding me how close I actually was to those intro skillbuilding classes was, I'm sure, all part of the plan.)

No matter how frustrated I'd feel (read: very), on some level I knew he was right, and the further I've gotten, the more grateful I am for what a consistent reminder I received as I went off into the world to forge my path.

All of this is leading up to me sharing a wonderful question I was sent over on Instagram this past week.

We talk often at BI about how "we provide high-quality, accessible management and leadership education to purpose-driven professionals". I could say it in my sleep. (Sometimes I feel like I probably do!) And a smart and incisive follower messaged me to ask:

Great question, Lydia (who has graciously given me permission to name-drop her). The answer is they're closely related, but not quite the same. And you know where we can zoom in to start to pull them apart? The basics. 🙂

Management vs Leadership as a response to

In this case, we're going back – just as my internship supervisor always pushed me to do – to the very first month of the very first semester of my MBA, where I took an "introduction to management" class.

We talked and read and wrote a lot that semester about John Kotter, who researches and teaches leadership, management, and change over at Harvard. If you've studied org theory, change management, or leadership, you likely know him. He has a wonderfully simple explanation for how we can conceptualize the difference between management and leadership. We start by asking: what are we responding to?

When we're responding to complexity, we're using our management muscle, usually by providing order and consistency. When we're responding to change, we're using our leadership muscle, usually by providing movement and adaptation.

Almost all of us do both, and when we stick with these basics, we can see why: complexity and change are closely related. Dealing with complexity often, by definition, cascades into change; dealing with change often requires addressing complexity. So they're not the same, and we can see how they're connected.

Framing your own work

To dig into this connection, we can use an example from your own professional life. Think of one thing at work that's feeling overwhelming, confusing, nerve-wracking right now – or even just something you're trying to avoid confronting. (We all feel it. #safespace)

Now ask:

Is this fundamentally a complexity problem? This often looks like too many moving parts, too many people, too much going on, and it's often solved by order and systems.

Or is this fundamentally a change problem? This often looks like a feeling that "something is shifting", like a team or a strategy, and it's often solved by buy-in or a new direction.

You might land on "both"; just as an example, the management skill of introducing systems often requires the leadership skill of generating buy-in. But I'll have you do two things:

1) Notice which one your brain reached for first. That's probably your dominant muscle, and it's core to your point of view and who you are as a professional.
2) Make a list of specific ways your work creates those outcomes: order & systems, movement & adaptation, all in the interest of building clarity.

Now you're one step closer to articulating how your work supports management and leadership!

If this got you thinking about how to talk about your work differently, quick reminder that our Transferable Skills for Purpose Driven Pros: PM Edition event is next week, and there's still time to sign up for FREE! Check it out here if you haven't already... and if you have, see you on Wednesday!