Separating Leadership from Management Is Nonsense

Engaged “management” versus leadership from on high Separating leadership from management and treating leadership as superior is nonsense. It harms management and does leadership no good at all. Management circles once favored the saying that leaders do the right things while managers do things right. It sounds sensible. But try doing the right things without doing them right, and you discover otherwise. Royal Bank of Canada CEO John Cleghorn called the office on his way to the airport to report a broken ATM. The bank had thousands of them. Was he managing minutiae? No—he was leading by example. Some of the best leaders participate directly in management. What is it like to be led by someone who does not manage? Their actions are bound to be detached from reality: they cannot know what the company should do next. Stanford business-school scholar James March put it well: “Leadership requires both plumbing and poetry.” Ignore claims that leadership and management are separate. They are two sides of one job. Have we not suffered enough from remote-control leaders concerned only with the “big picture”? Even the grandest picture must be drawn stroke by stroke, grounded in practical details. You may also have heard that we are overmanaged and underled. The opposite is true. We have plenty of leadership from on high, but not enough engaged management. The image compares the two; choose for yourself.