Manager or Leader? Who cares...

I’ve been doing the rounds of potential clients this week, talking to them about employee engagement and in particular about how engaged employees, who are generally happier and healthier, also tend to be more productive. One of the interesting things to have come from the meetings is how often people shied away from using the word “management”, preferring to talk instead about leadership. It got me thinking: when did management become a dirty word?

It was the late, great Peter Drucker who coined the phrase “management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things” – it’s an easy phrase to use and over the years it’s been used to denigrate the work of managers. Management has come to be equated with control, drudgery and the old-fashioned whilst leadership has become equated with vision, direction and the future. Management is dull whilst leadership is sexy.

Over the years, due in part to this pejorative meaning, perfectly good managers have tried to behave in the way they believe leaders behave. They have focussed, with the encouragement of their organisations, on “the vision thing”: on setting direction, laying down targets and key performance indicators and then measuring their teams against their progress towards these targets. Somewhere, over that period, the human side of being a manager has slipped away.

The CIPD say that a manager’s key duty is to “play a pivotal role in terms of implementing and enacting HR policies and practices”. Not once in their factsheet about the duties of a manager does it talk about the need for managers to have good personal relationships with the people in their teams; to like them, to care about them, to get on with them. Nothing about encouraging and fostering good relationships within the team. Nothing, in other words, about all the things that go towards making the workplace more than a place of drudgery.

Leader or manager? It’s irrelevant, a false dichotomy. You can be a manager without being a leader and a leader without being a manager. Rather than worrying about what to call people, let’s focus instead on bringing the human dimension back to the workplace and realise that there’s more to being both a manager or leader than just focussing on the numbers.