The org chart is a half truth - Part 3

The murmuration in your organization: defining leadership and management

This is the third instalment of three - maybe more it’s too early to rule anything out in this slog¹ - proposing new paradigms for organizations, leadership and management. If you haven’t read the other two, you probably should. You will improve my chances of this making sense to you. But if you don’t, I’ll just say that the difference is not what you’re used to.

Both leadership and management exist to influence people.

Leaders use ideas and managers use rules and tools. 

ON THE TUNDRA

Twenty years ago, I was one of four deputy ministers on board a Royal Canadian Mounted Police twin otter bush plane bound for northern Labrador. There were also four assistant commissioners, and a deputy commissioner of the RCMP. The pilot was also RCMP. It is helpful to know that the RCMP is sometimes criticized as overly hierarchical, and deputy commissioners and assistant commissioners are the second and third tier from the tip top of the force, respectively. The pilot was well down the ranks, but we all listened attentively as he gave a safety talk unlike any other, starting with the features the plane didn’t have:

“If we lose cabin pressure no oxygen masks will fall out of the ceiling because there are no oxygen masks up there. But that’s okay because the cabin isn’t pressurized. And that’s okay too because we won’t be flying that high.”

Then he added reassuringly:

“But, if we have to put down – although I’ve been flying in Labrador for 10 years and I don’t know where we could put down – but if we do, we’ll have everything we need.  We have lots of things that they don’t have on planes down south. We have a tent, flares, sleeping bags, rations, an axe, and a shotgun.” The deputy commissioner, asked, “Are there ten sleeping bags?” “No sir, there’s only four” the pilot conceded before quickly adding conspiratorially, “but there’s six shotgun shells.”

We all laughed because, like so much of dark humour it reminded us that, if we crashed, our social veneer would be the first casualty on the tundra. Management, at least its influence, would be the second. We didn’t crash but it got me thinking about leadership and management.

It’s time we talked about a separation

Nothing is so problematic as an idea whose time has passed.²

The idea that the boss is, for better or worse, The Leader is an anachronism. It should be abolished and so should The Leader.  

Throughout history distinguishing between leader and manager didn’t much matter. In the Industrial Era the boss usually knew more than the workers about, say, making rivets.  But today, because of the horizontal distribution of ideas, knowledge, (cue the foraging baboons), and skills, no one person can know what is possible let alone how to do it. Management accepts leadership so often we don’t think about it.  Of course, the Assistant Commissioner of the RCMP submitted to the pilot’s onboard directions. I for one would have got off the plane if he started giving orders to the pilot about how to fly it.

Managers need a variety of people to lead them depending on what skills, knowledge, or characteristics the situation calls for.

Leadership is peripatetic.

But we still act as if leadership it is static. We call the senior managers “the leadership team”, expect the boss to be The Leader, and consider it a failure when bosses aren’t. The words “leadership” and “management” even appear in each other’s definitions.

They shouldn’t because, as Waylon Smithers would say³,

Why do we conflate leadership and management?  There are many reasons. Here are four:

1. Leaders and managers do the same thing, influence people.

2. Managers lead or attempt to because of ego or fear of rivals.

3. History has a long tail. Paradigms persist if we don’t examine them.

4. People with “leadership qualities” win promotion to management positions.

We’ve all heard of managers who (as the saying goes) “…can tell people to go to Hell and have them look forward to the trip”. But just because management and leadership are occasionally simultaneous does not make them synonymous. Leadership and management are, like reading and writing, related but not twins and certainly not Siamese twins. Joining them at the hip hobbles both. Managers should lead only when the occasion requires it.

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See the section entitled “Mission, permission, desperation, and vacuum” where I learned that accidentally:

The org chart is a half truth - the sequel

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Some managers are not so lucky. We have all seen them at the front of a hall full of employees earnestly touting a new initiative while a joker at the back ridicules the plan in a low voice.  I have seen it and done both.

The manager is the manager. The staff pick their leader at any given moment.

Leadership and management both influence people’s ideas and decisions but in different ways, and frequently to different effect. So, it is vital to distinguish between leadership and management for the same reason we distinguish between hammers and screwdrivers. The task dictates the tool, and the adroit combination of tools gets the best results.

To update our leadership and management paradigms we must first overcome two erroneous implicit assumptions,

1. Leadership and management are the same.

2. They’re different but only because leadership is better than management.

Tomato/potato – liquid leadership/solid management

Leadership is conferred by followers - people who believe another person has special knowledge, characteristics, or skills that are valuable (or cool) in the context. The belief may be ill-founded and based on a misreading of the situation or the leader but, in a sense, all leadership is situational.

Management is conferred by an organization and reaches only as far as the organization reaches. On the tundra, the influence of the RCMP’s management structure is directly proportional to your assessment of both you and the Deputy Commissioner returning to work.

Even so, we would all be looking for leaders as soon as we crawled from the wreckage. Initially we’d all look to the pilot for leadership. He knows the plane, its contents, where we are, and how to operate the radio.  A previous crash – a very bad thing when we were on the tarmac – would suddenly seem be an advantage, especially if all those passengers had survived.

We civilians would look to the RCMP officers for leadership on the assumption that they know what to do in an emergency. But, if one of the civilians happened to be a cold weather survival expert, everyone – the most senior officer included - would look to that person for leadership.

As the prospect of rescue faded so too would deference to management. A new culture, no less calculating than career ambitions but with higher stakes, would emerge and with it a leader or leaders thought most likely to further it. Our thoughts would turn to the six shotgun shells more frequently because a shared contextual assumption does not always result in sharing.

But I digress. The point is management is a solid that is confined to the organization. As to leadership, recall Winston Churchill whose career demonstrated that leadership is situational and, for that reason, transient. Circumstances define the leadership required and circumstance is fluid. So, leadership is a liquid that flows along circumstance’s contours. The more we try to hold it in our hands the bigger the mess because no one has the right combination of credibility, knowledge, and skills to lead effectively in every circumstance. 

Dull eyed plodders

Unfortunately, when a distinction between leadership and management is drawn, it casts management as the drab cousin of leadership. Though the best leadership is sometimes poetry and management is always prose, management is not failed leadership any more than great novels are failed poetry. But you’d never know it from the definitions.   

It may be because managing sooner or later requires paperwork, but leadership has the better aphorisms. It’s hard not to love, “Managers do things right and leaders do the right things” (attributed to both Warren Bennis and Peter Drucker). The obvious implication is that managers are pedestrian rule followers and leaders are unbounded heroes.

Neither leadership nor management is inherently or invariably better than the other. They have different strengths and weaknesses. Each is elegant when applied appropriately and skilfully.

According to a Chinese proverb calling things by their correct names is the beginning of wisdom.  What the World needs now is to level the definitional playing field.

Definitions: the view from the top

We should not fear striking out on our own. We have the words of no less an authority than an egg, in fact The Egg. 

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone.  "It means just what I choose it to mean - neither more or less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all." ⁴ 

Defining management

There is a George Grenshaw cartoon that shows a group of people in suits sitting around a table. The man at the head says, “All those opposed signify by saying ‘I quit’”. While leadership is, like gravity, invisible and not well understood by most of us – particularly by people most under its influence – the lines between managers and subordinates are clear and, if not charted, chartable.  There is clarity in management.  We know who is in charge at any given time and what they can do.  We submit to it when we become an employee or contractor and are done with it when we leave. 

Here is my definition of management:

1. As a noun: the accountable authority in an organization, or part of it, with responsibility to use the organization’s tools and rules to coordinate activities in order to achieve the organization’s objects.

2. As a verb: the exercise of specific powers delegated by an organization.

“Tools” are everything the organization uses to get things done - offices, factories, equipment, intellectual property, vehicles and so on. While “rules” includes everything from procedures manuals, processes, boundaries, and required outcomes to vague notions baked into the culture, including the informal culture in the darkest corner of the organization that management tolerates or doesn’t know about but should.

We organize to do to do things we can’t or don’t want to do alone, like produce things we can’t buy for less in the market. Management is entirely the creature of an organization. It’s sole purpose and power is to construct an artificial micro context that influences people to achieve the organization’s objects.  

A manager for all seasons

Being a manager is certainly less gratifying than having a gaggle of admiring followers – ideally attractive admiring followers. However, there is honour in management. Leaders might be the life of the party but, when the party is over, Management sees to the cleanup because it agreed to look after the house for the owners. In every organization, Management is accountable for what happened, what didn’t happen, and what happens next.

There are lines, however smudged at times, of accountability for the exercise of the delegated powers.  When I was a senior manager, my rough guide was that, if I was doing something that would require my signature, I was managing. There would be a record and my name would be on it. Managers submit to the hindsight of whomever delegated authority to their position. It’s painful at times but accepting collective blame is the foundation of the manager’s authority over staff.  

The source of a manager’s authority is the delegation given their position, but the source of their power is their subordinates’ confidence in their willingness to be accountable for them.

The manager gets to tell staff what to do because the manager accounts for what they do. It is the same in all organizations. I was part of the team that delivered the orientation program for new cabinet ministers when a new government was sworn in. I told them they were ministers because they’d been elected and selected; elected by the people and selected by the premier, but they will really only control their department to the extent they are publicly accountable for the people who work there. Or, as I once said to a minister, “If you are going to blame me publicly for a decision, I’m going to make it.”

I know there are managers who are buck passers. I am speaking conceptually, and the proof of concept is the outrage provoked by buck passing managers.

Defining leadership: more piety and poetry than precision

The first problem when re-defining leadership is bad poetry.

I was sitting in the office of an acquaintance, just chatting, when he mentioned he was writing a book on leadership. I was doubly surprised because we were talking about neither leadership nor books. I suppose we’ve both reached that age. I asked him to tell me about it because he was going to anyway. I meant the book.

He transformed before my eyes and raised his eyes sublimely toward a mid-field vision only he could see. After a magisterial pause, he said something along these lines: “Leadership is the ability to inspire others; the ability to paint a picture of a future state that excites people’s imagination, so they are energized to the tasks required to get there. A leader is decisive, consistent, and willing to make tough decisions; and is a real team player who cares about people and values consensus...” And that’s all I recall.

It might be leadership but it’s not a definition. It’s feel-good phrases about a fictional character we think we’d like to be, or at least work for. 

What is it about describing leadership that moves otherwise sensible people to go into a state of ecstasy and speak in tongues? So many “definitions” of leadership are aphorisms that titillate more than illuminate. Here’s another: the usefulness of a definition is inversely proportional to its wit.

Leadership defined

Leadership is the influential communication or validation of an idea.⁵

Leadership is sometimes breathlessly attributed to charisma but that’s just one of innumerable factors that confer credibility, many of which are actually irrelevant. Celebrity and good looks work frighteningly well too. As do height and the solemn credibility conferred by a deeper than average voice, whether male or female. And nothing beats a confident demeanour. (The foraging baboons again)

The ability to manage relationships, and real experience and expertise, often only come to the fore with frequent contact.

Leadership’s power is influential ideas and feelings, and may be as simple as you thinking I know what I’m talking about just now. The ideas are often vague and sometimes misleading – the unwarranted self-confidence or attractive appearance of a person works until the day when you see them in a different light. But your manager is your boss regardless of lighting.

Unlike management, which is conferred by the organization on a position, leadership is personal, conferred by followers and reaches wherever there are followers.

All it takes to be a leader is a follower.  

Conclusion

This murmuration trilogy is intended as a reference guide to subsequent posts. In my mind at least, this newsletter is a web of posts the reader can crawl around on by following the links. It all relates.

Next I will try my hand at explaining what I mean by the Ideas Era here:

Thanks for reading this far.

1. From my personal dictionary, Slog, n, a portmanteau of Substack and blog.

2. With apologies to Victor Hugo.

3. "Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield", Season 7 / Episode 14 (13:28)

4. “Through the Looking-Glass” by Lewis Carroll pen name of Charles Dodson an Oxford mathematician. Wonderland is odd and never more so than when it is logical.

5. This includes ideas that repel people. I first wrote the leader’s idea but opted in the end for the minimalist “an idea”. Intent to influence is not necessary. Certainly, leaders argue for a cause, describe a goal or deliberately set an example. But frequently, inadvertently and unfortunately do it through their actions. They may not even know people are following.