Leadership and Management are two different things.
Leadership is not management.
Leadership has to come first.
Management is a bottom-line focus: How
can I best accomplish certain things?
Leadership deals with the top
line: What are the things I want to accomplish?
In the words of both
Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, “Management is doing things right;
leadership is doing the right things.”
Management is efficiency in
climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder
is leaning against the right wall.
The leader is the one who climbs the
tallest tree, surveys the entire situation, and yells, “Wrong jungle!”
But how do the busy, efficient producers and managers often respond?
“Shut up! We’re making progress.”
At the final session of a year-long
executive development program in Seattle, the president of an oil
company came up to me and said, “Stephen, when you pointed out the
difference between leadership and management in the second month, I
looked at my role as the president of this company and realized that I
had never been into leadership. I was deep into management, buried by
pressing challenges and the details of day-to-day logistics. So I
decided to withdraw from management. I could get other people to do
that. I wanted to really lead my organization.
“It was hard. I went through withdrawal
pains because I stopped dealing with a lot of the pressing, urgent
matters that were right in front of me and which gave me a sense of
immediate accomplishment. I didn’t receive much satisfaction as I
started wrestling with the direction issues, the culture-building
issues, the deep analysis of problems, the seizing of new opportunities.
Others also went through withdrawal pains from their working style
comfort zones. They missed the easy accessibility I had given them
before. They still wanted me to be available to them, to respond, to
help solve their problems on a day-to-day basis.”
“But I persisted. I was absolutely
convinced that I needed to provide leadership. And I did. Today our
whole business is different. We’re more in line with our environment. We
have doubled our revenues and quadrupled our profits. I’m into
leadership.”
I’m convinced that too often parents are
also trapped in the management paradigm, thinking of control,
efficiency, and rules instead of direction, purpose, and family feeling.
And leadership is even more lacking in
our personal lives. We’re into managing with efficiency, setting and
achieving goals before we have even clarified our values.”
Extracts from the Seven Habits of Highly effective People
By Stephen R. Covey
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