Tag: Managers vs Leaders

It’s a Good Sign When a Manager Feels Bored

Jason ScrivenLeave a comment

That’s right – a good manager should be trying to get to “bored” as quickly as possible .

It means you have delegated, managed and assigned all the urgent and not important work that makes you feel busy.  And it will allow you to spend serious, quality, slow moving time on the really important stuff -strategy, hiring, team building, coaching, and your own personal development.

What does bored feel like?

Many managers will never know because they only know busy.  Busy is not a bad thing when things need to get done that need a manager’s input , or their presence at 4 key client meetings and a dinner in one day, or at the end of the quarter when the financials need to be carefully reviewed and signed off.

A full day of performance reviews.  That’s good busy.  That’s busy with long term, important things that affect the whole company.

Bad busy is logging into your email at 7am and never leaving your desk.  It’s arbitrary deadlines, unrealistic client deliverables and last minute requests that are out of process – all on top of your normal day.  It’s going back to the office after you take two hours for your own personal life.  It’s logging in while you sit in bed.  It’s trying to do too many things in too short a time.

That kind of busy is pretty common and even held up as a badge of honour, especially at small start-ups or fast growing companies.  If we are moving fast and sleeping less, we must be growing and making more money.  I can sleep later.

But it’s not sustainable or healthy for a manager or their company and leads to burnout personally and a decline in performance professionally.  Unfortunately, many managers never escape the cycle of bad busy.  When they do escape, that’s when they feel bored and start looking around for another crisis, another deadline, another project or another job.  So they can find that quick rush of bad busy – which is the only rush they’ve ever known.

So the next time you feel bored – celebrate it and start adding long-term important work to your daily and weekly calendar.

Large blocks of door closed, out of office time that will make you and the company better.  Recruiting meetings with star candidates from other firms.  Industry conferences and seminars.  Workshops on new skills.  Weekly one to ones with members of your team.  Lunches with other managers in the same company.  You know, the work that is expected of a leader.

Pretty soon you will be good busy.

Is is Better to be a Leader than a Manager?

Jason Scriven5 Comments

In the last week, the comparison of leader vs. manager has popped up a couple of times in my LinkedIn feed usually through a quote that implies that it’s better to be a leader than a manager. Here is one as an example, from someone whose ideas I admire:

Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.  –Tom Peters

While I am hoping that Tom intended to demonstrate the different skills inherent in managing and leading, it is likely taken by most people as an either or statement.  If you are a manager, all you do is arrange and tell, but when you are a leader, the choirs sing and the heavens part as you nurture and enhance your team. Most readers would also take those attributes and assign them by proxy to managers and leaders – because surely it’s better to be a leader than a manager.

But in most companies when do you start being a leader? At some executive title that is slightly higher up the food chain than a mere manager?  Can a supervisor be a leader?  How about a coordinator?  Or a customer service representative?

The good news is that you can do both, no matter what your job is.

Leadership and management are skill sets, not titles.

Managers demonstrate leadership skills every day and not at the expense of “arranging and telling”.  Most companies would fall apart without a manager that makes the shift schedules and communicates new policies to their team while creating an environment where people are motivated and engaged.

It is true that the balance tips more toward leadership type work the higher you climb the corporate ladder, but even C-suite executives are still spending portions of their day managing – with performance reviews, asset allocation decisions and directives on new product lines.

So yes, there is a difference between being a manager and an executive and one does tend to do more leadership type work than the other.  Both are valuable to the organization – precisely because they do the right amount of managing vs leading.

So let’s add an asterisk to Tom’s quote:

Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.** –Tom Peters

**and you should try to do both well.**