Manager or Leader – Which should you strive to be? Righttrack Whispers

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Righttrack Whispers

Manager or Leader – Which should you strive to be?

by Sarah Goodfellow

In the current economic climate, the organisational setting is one that’s incredibly tough on many fronts. As a manager or a leader in an organisation you are expected to achieve greatness with fewer and fewer resources. This is happening in a backdrop of confusion about should I be a Manager or a Leader?

The answer in today’s organisation is that you are expected to be both! So if you’re expected to be both then.....what exactly is the difference between the two roles? You may have manager in your job title yet you are put onto Leadership Development Programmes and are expected to lead either your team or your department.

Here’s a quick self-assessment activity for you to try out.....put the following tasks/activities into two distinct categories; one is the manager category the second is the leader category. Text turning green means you have got the right category, text turning red means you might want to think again.......

	Scheduling work
	Sharing a vision
	Plan and prioritise steps to task achievement
	Use analytical data to support recommendations
	Explain goals, plan and roles
	Provide feedback on performance
	Motivating staff
	Provide focus
	Create a ‘culture’
	Inspiring people
	Delegating tasks
	Ensuring predictability
	Co-ordinate effort
	Co-ordinate resources
	Give orders and instructions
	Act as interface between team and outside
	Take risks
	Guide progress
	Monitor progress
	Check task completion
	Create a positive team feeling
	Monitor feelings and morale
	Look ‘over the horizon’
	Appeal to peoples’ emotions
	Follow systems and procedures
	Provide development opportunities
	Ensure effective induction
	Monitor budgets, tasks etc
	Use analytical data to forecast trends
	Monitoring progress
	Unleashing potential
	Be a good role model
	Appeal to rational thinking
	Build teams

......so, how did you do? It’s not as easy as it might initially seem. The reason for any difficulties mirrors the fact that you are likely to be playing both roles. I also suspect that there were tasks on that list they you wanted to put into a third category of ‘not sure’......

Essentially the difference between being a manager and a leader can be summarised in the table below

Manager	Leader
Short to medium term focus	Medium to Long Term Focus
Operational / Tactical focus	Strategic / Big Picture
Task Oriented	People/Emotion Oriented
Results Focussed	Hearts & Minds Focussed

There is merit in both roles but they have distinct differences.

With the pressure on to perform, it’s likely that your focus may have become largely managerial. A drive to deliver within financial and resource constraints! However, it’s not to be forgotten that it’s people who work for you and they need to feel trust & inspired by their leader. As great military leaders throughout history have discovered...if you can inspire trust & confidence in your followers... they will literally go over the top for you!

So are you a manager or are you a leader, or are you both? If you’re both, which I suspect you may be; take this quick questionnaire to find out the proportions of each role.

Remember: It’s about getting the balance right. If you’ve been focussing too much on one role then you need to consciously spend some time devoted to the other. Yin and Yang!

Now establish your current style using the questionnaire below

What’s Your Style - Manager or Leader?

Fill in this brief questionnaire. Spread 5 points between each of these pairs of statements:

1. My energy as a boss is concentrated on

getting things working smoothly now

my long-term vision

2. Relationships with my team are typically

steady

turbulent

3. Where work and home are concerned I

make a clear cut-off between the two

blend them

4. I like to reward people

with a decent salary

through personal praise and recognition

5. I hold people accountable through

emphasising their loyalty to me

sensibly agreed goals that we negotiate

6. My approach to motivating my staff is

to involve people through close consultation

to keep expecting more than they think they can give

7. My attitude to problems is to

fix them before they grow into messes which could get us into worse problems

find them – if there isn’t a problem, there’s something we haven’t yet noticed

8. I value individuals who will

challenge me

support me

9. It is more important to me to spend my energy

looking 5 years ahead

being clear about what we can do now

10. It is important from time to time to spend some money on

celebrating our successes and publicising our achievements to the rest of the world

investing in offsite meetings where we look calmly at what's working and what isn't

11. I feel

a strong sense I am right in my hunches about where the organisation/department needs to go

that it is sensible to look carefully at what other organisations have done that has worked

12. My authority comes from

respect for my status in the organisation

my ability to enthuse people

13. My watchword as a boss is

hope

realism

14. One of the most important things a boss has to do is to

be clear about what he or she expects

challenge complacency

15. When organisations say they value their staff, one real touchstone for me is how much they invest in

developing their people

providing the equipment and systems that their people need

16. The people I lead regard me as

a role model

a decent human being

17. I talk about my fundamental values

a lot

to my close associates

18. In managing change, it is important to

acknowledge the achievements of the past

acknowledge what has really ended

19. In managing change I Iike to

give people my hopes and ideas about the change

get people’s own ideas about what to do

20. As a boss I often

mediate between my staff

teach my staff

Resources

Righttrack Whispers

Manager or Leader – Which should you strive to be?

What’s Your Style - Manager or Leader?