Kirralea Walkerden
Facilitator, Executive & Leadership Coach - The Real Learning Experience
In our previous blog Born to Manage, Learn to Lead we discussed the fact that no-one is, or ever will be, born the perfect leader. Every person is born with traits that may one day help them to be an excellent leader. Unfortunately, each of us is born with traits that may get in the way as well.
In our workshops we have a saying we like to use when we begin a leadership program which is – “Having a title doesn’t make you any more of a leader, then standing in a garage makes you a car.”
Why do we like to use this?
Because we feel it helps participants break the thought process that can often be along the lines of “I am not a leader as I don’t have an official leadership title”…
But, you know what? We can all be a leader before we have an official title. In fact, the best leaders are the ones that have been doing small actions in a leadership manner long before they ever were given a title.
The belief in being a leader because you hold a title is the key element that causes people in these roles to lack reflection and the self awareness to their leadership lacking’s. As a result this means they never work on these leadership lacking’s. On the other side, it can also can be a barrier for others because they don’t aspire to take on leadership behaviours because they lack the title.
What Leadership is…
Our belief is that leadership is not about who you are. It doesn’t matter what your gender, education, experience, where you live, nationality – none of this matters! Leadership is about what you do.
We often say – in order to be a good leader, we need to find out what great leaders do – and do more of those actions.
Most managers are very good at understanding the task at hand, but often in the case of what we like to call “accidental manager” they have very little leadership experience. We often ask people what was the biggest surprise for them in becoming a leader and almost every time we are met with – “the people issues”!
The fact is when you are a leader – people issues are your job! As you grow as a leader you need to move away from the way you have been (often more task focused) and lean into and head towards creating good learning environments for your team. This means dealing with the people issues.
No one has a career goal of setting out to “become a leader”. Most of us find that along the journey of our career, we become what we like to call an accidental manager or accidental leader. That happens when we are really good at our job, we are identified as someone the organisation wants to hold onto yet not a lot of us have received formal training on how to lead people and teams. This can often mean we have a gap between where we are as a manager, and where we want to be as a leader. This is our leadership journey.
Management or Leadership – what is the difference?
When we discuss what leadership is, we like to be clear on what the differences are between leadership and management. A good way we do this in our workshops is we will put together a big list of actions and behaviours that one person will generally do within an organisation in their role and we ask groups to determine whether they feel each action is more a leadership action or a management action.
What we need to remember is all the actions on the list are important, but we like to ask two questions to help understand the key difference:
What would happen if we did not manage for a day? It would not take long before everyone would start to see and feel things going a little pear shaped.
What would happen if we did not lead for a day? The reality is we can often not lead for the day and the immediate result of this is not always evident. However, after a few days, weeks or months it becomes very evident.
Therefore we can often look at management as compulsory and leadership as discretionary. Your leadership actions may not be always noticed, but they make a big difference to the organisation culture.
Some key points we like to point out are:
- Leadership is more about inspiring people with a vision. Management is more about executing a task or process
- Leadership is about developing people, providing opportunities and growth for the future. Management is about looking after people day to day.
- Leadership is more tangible.
It is having a quiet word in someone’s ear to see if they are ok, or having an authentic conversations with someone when two people may be experiencing conflict or not collaborating as well as they could be. Management is more tangible. Follow this process, do this report.
Leadership is inspiring the individuals and team around you to work towards the goal. Management is executing the process.
It’s all about finding a balance.
Everyone will notice when you don’t do management, but not everyone will immediately notice when you don’t act with leadership! Which is why it is so important to commit to small actions everyday. There is always pressure to manage but there is often less pressure to be a leader as it is less tangible.
Leadership is often the little things you do, that dont really get noticed but make a BIG difference to the culture you work in.
The truth is we need both leadership and management, and its often the balance of wearing two hats and switching effectively between. All leadership and no management creates an environment of good intentions, good engagement but little structure. All management and no leadership means we have a very robotic and boring environment. The balance is the key.
Management is doing things right – Leadership is doing the right things.
A lot of actions you do in a management role take on a real leadership flavour when you do the right thing – we call this giving it a leadership overlay to our everyday behaviours and actions. This then empowers the people around us – a good example is the process of a Performance Appraisal.
A Manager
As an effective manager you will go through every aspect of the performance appraisal process and follow the company protocol so that the task is completed and the appropriate report can be made regarding its completion.
A Leader
As an effective leader you can add a leadership overlay to this task by some simple actions:
- Knowing that your actions and conversations with the person you are completing the performance appraisal for is going to have them walk away from the interaction with you knowing they feel good about themselves (remember there should be nothing new come up in a performance appraisal for the person being appraised, don’t leave discussing important issues to here – but that is a topic for another post…)
- Ask them what you can do to help them, how can you be a better leader for them?
- Ask them how they are going, what do they need from you as their leader/manager?
- What are their goals for the next period, how can you help them achieve this?
- How do they feel about what has been discussed?
Being a good manager is more often than not a lot more natural, instinctive and easier for us all. Its our natural comfort zone as often we have been given the role because of how effective we are at the tasks involved . Being a good leader is more of a journey of deliberate development. It is adding a human overlay to the process, so you are doing the management process but you are doing it better – you are doing it as a leader.
So my question to you is, what have you done over the last month that has placed a leadership layer over your everyday actions?
This can be in work, at home in your personal life, in a role you have within the community – remember we don’t have to have a leadership title to take on leadership behaviours.
If you cannot think of anything I challenge you to decide what leadership layers you are going to implement over the next four weeks in your role with your organisation, at home or in a role you hold within your community.