Developing business leaders. Bath, Bristol, w/w.

Leader or Manager?

This article looks at some of the research underlying different approaches to leadership and management, further to the Finding True North newsletter about the subject.

The original newsletter was triggered by some interesting newspaper coverage early in 2010 which suggested that under the British "Thatcher government" entrepreneurs had thrived, whereas under the current "New Labour" managers had thrived, perhaps to the extent that too many such posts were created.

It is important to distinguish between management and leadership, and to see that both are done well.

A manager builds and marshals resources – often including people – in order to deliver particular results. The responsibility of leaders is to hold up and develop mission, vision, and strategy and to motivate and align people towards these goals. The leader sees people as assets and seeks to encourage people to use their gifts and strengths for the common cause. This means that managers can be great leaders, that a leader does not necessarily do management work, and that a lot of leadership is about attitude (and particularly attitude towards people).

Leadership is about direction and about influence, so we can all do leadership even if we do not hold a leadership post.

In the 1960’s Douglas McGregor (who worked for the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) said that there were two approaches to management, which he called Theory X and Theory Y. Theory X says that people essentially dislike work, and need to be coerced to do it. Theory Y, which I think he preferred and advocated, recognised that people may want to succeed and could enjoy their work. In Theory Y, the way for the leader to achieve results is to pass on responsibility and to build a climate of trust.

Perhaps inevitably, someone had to come up with a Theory Z. In 1986 American W Edwards Deming wrote a book “Out of the Crisis” in which he advocated a move away from checking and inspection to ensure quality towards improving quality in the product and process partly through designing it in and partly through involving and empowering the workforce. These ideas were not universally welcomed in the USA at the time, but were picked by others particularly in Japan where he went and where it led to the Kaizen approach.

So, why is this important? The underlying question, which this research draws out, is whether we see people as resourceful and trustworthy and so encourage them to show initiative (Theory Y or Z) or whether we think the only way to success is through control or coercion (Theory X). This applies not just to other people we lead or manage, but to the way we treat ourselves too.

Much of the work we do at Finding True North is coaching. Coaching assumes that the person receiving coaching wants to learn and to develop and will take responsibility for their own learning. Whether coaching skills and techniques are being used by a professional coach or by a line manager it is important that the context is one of the coach seeking to help the other to learn and develop, as distinct from controlling their behaviour!

How can you use this information to develop an appropriate leadership style?