Hi everyone,
I found this on a Harvard Business School Blog and
felt it appropriate to share. I am a
follower of the work of Kotter. His books
on Change and Urgency are well done and there are certainly valuable “nuggets”
that be adapted for use in law enforcement organizations.
All the best,
Steve Morreale
Worcester State University
* * * * * *
Management
Is (Still) Not Leadership
by John Kotter - 11:00
AM January 9, 2013 HBR Blog network
A few weeks ago, the BBC asked me to
come in for a radio
interview. They told me they wanted to talk about effective
leadership — China had just elevated Xi Jinping to the role of Communist Party
leader; General David Petraeus had stepped down from his post at the CIA a few
days earlier; the BBC itself was wading through a leadership scandal of its own
— but the conversation quickly veered, as these things often do, into a
discussion about how individuals can keep large, complex, unwieldy organizations
operating reliably and efficiently.
That’s not leadership, I explained.
That’s management — and the two are radically different.
In more than four decades of
studying businesses and consulting to organizations on how to implement new
strategies, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people use the words “leadership”
and “management” synonymously, and it
drives me crazy every time.
The interview reminded
me once again that the confusion around these two terms is massive, and that
misunderstanding gets in the way of any reasonable discussion about how to
build a company, position it for success and win in the twenty-first century.
The mistakes people make on the issue are threefold:
Mistake #1: People use the terms “management” and
“leadership” interchangeably. This shows that they don’t see the crucial
difference between the two and the vital functions that each role plays.
Mistake #2: People use the term “leadership” to refer to
the people at the very top of hierarchies. They then call the people in the
layers below them in the organization “management.” And then all the rest are
workers, specialists, and individual contributors. This is also a mistake and
very misleading.
Mistake #3: People often think of “leadership” in terms of
personality characteristics, usually as something they call charisma. Since few
people have great charisma, this leads logically to the conclusion that few
people can provide leadership, which gets us into increasing trouble.
In fact, management is a
set of well-known processes, like planning, budgeting, structuring jobs, staffing
jobs, measuring performance and problem-solving, which help an organization to
predictably do what it knows how to do well. Management helps you to produce
products and services as you have promised, of consistent quality, on budget,
day after day, week after week. In organizations of any size and complexity,
this is an enormously difficult task. We constantly underestimate how complex
this task really is, especially if we are not in senior management jobs. So,
management is crucial — but it’s not leadership.
Leadership is entirely
different. It is associated with taking an organization into the future,
finding opportunities that are coming at it faster and faster and successfully
exploiting those opportunities. Leadership is about vision, about people buying
in, about empowerment and, most of all, about producing useful change.
Leadership is not about attributes, it’s about behavior. And in an
ever-faster-moving world, leadership is increasingly needed from more and more
people, no matter where they are in a hierarchy. The notion that a few
extraordinary people at the top can provide all the leadership needed today is
ridiculous, and it’s a recipe for failure.
Some people still argue
that we must replace management with leadership. This is obviously not so: they
serve different, yet essential, functions. We need superb management. And we
need more superb leadership. We need to be able to make our complex
organizations reliable and efficient. We need them to jump into the future —
the right future — at an accelerated pace, no matter the size of the changes
required to make that happen.
There are very, very few
organizations today that have sufficient leadership. Until we face this issue,
understanding exactly what the problem is, we’re never going to solve it.
Unless we recognize that we’re not talking about management when we speak of
leadership, all we will try to do when we do need more leadership is work
harder to manage. At a certain point, we end up with over-managed and under-led
organizations, which are increasingly vulnerable in a fast-moving world.
* * * * * *
For more from Kotter, see his
books entitled: Leading Change, What Leaders
Really Do, and A Sense of Urgency.
