You could probably fill a book with short, pithy sayings about what makes the difference between a manager and a leader.
Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis had a good one when they said, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
Stephen R. Covey, in his famous book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, illustrated the difference by using an analogy.
He says this: Imagine a group of people, cutting their way through a dense jungle with machetes. These are the producers, the problem solvers. They are clearing away the underbrush.
Behind the producers come the managers. The managers sharpen the machetes, write the policy and procedure manuals, hold muscle development programs, and set the schedules and compensation packages for the people with the machetes.
Who is the leader in this scenario? According to Covey, he’s the one who climbs the tallest tree, surveys the entire situation, and yells, “Wrong jungle!”
To which the people on the ground will often reply, “Shut up! We’re making excellent progress!”
Don’t laugh. Ever see the movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai?
If you haven’t, it’s about a large group of British POWs in Burma during World War II. The POWs are forced to build a railroad bridge by their Japanese captors. The Japanese botch the job, because they don’t have the necessary engineering skills. When this happens, the POWs’ ranking officer, a British colonel played by Alec Guinness, takes charge of the operation and builds a successful bridge. He does this partly to shame the Japanese, and partly to keep his men busy and their morale high.
The colonel is a by-the-book type who becomes so obsessed with building the bridge that he loses sight of the larger fact that he is helping the Japanese war effort. It is only at the end of the picture that he realizes his mistake and cries out, “What have I done?!”
He was an excellent manager, but he lacked the vision to be a real leader.
So the first quality of a leader is vision. All the other qualities of leadership: qualities like courage, character, charisma – and any others you care to name -- are important to leadership only because they help the leader achieve his vision.
Now, anyone can cultivate the secondary qualities of leadership. You can make a habit of being brave, honest, and generous, for example. You can develop your powers of persuasion. You can be of service in your community.
You can broaden your knowledge base. You can keep learning, so you will have the wisdom you need to make high-level decisions. You can work at different jobs in order to better understand the business you are and to better relate to the different people who work in that business. You can do all that and more –- and you’ll be a more successful person for it, I’m sure. But without vision, you won’t be a leader.
Comments (1)
I'm very familiar with Peter Drucker's work and I don't remember him writing: "managers do things right while leaders do the right things." A Google search returns 78 hits with this quote but I bet they all or originated from a "single" source rather than from his actual writings.
If one counted up the total chapters that he wrote less than 1 percent mentioned leadership. He constantly stressed doing the right thing which he associated with management not leadership. In fact he once wrote he wanted nothing to do with leadership because the three greatest leaders (those with the largest following) of the last 100 years were Hitler, Stalin, and Mao -- they created nothing but destruction.
The Effective Executive is not a leadership book but a book on doing the right things. Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices has no chapters on leadership, but it explicitly stresses doing the right thing and being effective. The title of chapter 19 in The Essential Drucker is "Leadership as Work." He summarized the chapter as being an effective manager.
There is a language problem here: people doing the same things they always did have hijacked the word management and applied it to what they were already doing and called themselves managers. Looking around the economy, the social sector, or government it is hard to find examples of institutions practicing the management Peter Drucker wrote about! The same language hijacking issue applies to innovation, marketing, and grave-diggers ....++++
In summary the quote could be: administrators focus on doing things right while true managers do the right thing. The essence of management is to do the right thing, otherwise it would be mis-management or non-management.
Posted by Bob Embry | October 4, 2007 5:48 PM
Posted on October 4, 2007 17:48