Managing Is Not Leading
Leadership is an essential part of management tasks. Countless studies, practical manuals, experience reports, how-to self-help books, and seminars on the next popular leadership style exist on the market. They all want to bring managers closer to how leadership works and what is important. The desire for orientation in relation to leadership has remained with many managers. Or to put it another way: There is hardly any other topic that managers feel more insecure about than with regard to their own management actions. Why should it be any different? Leadership is not something that can be studied, but something that has to be learned through practical action and refined through reflection.
The thing with leadership is basically very simple. Leadership is first and foremost a people business that starts with people and is geared toward people. Unfortunately, it does not help that people in organizations are referred to as human resources or talents because it dehumanizes and reduces them to those who fulfill a function and brings about performance within a system. Of course, this leads to the misconception that “something like it” can be managed.
Leading is progress
Let’s take a closer look at what leading is all about: Unlike a production task, leading people is detached from a visible and tangible product. At the end (if there can be an end to leadership) there is nothing tangible or a service that can be experienced, e.g. in the sense of an event. Rather, leadership is an experience of action that conveys orientation and security.
A closer look at the terms managing and leading brings further clarification: While managing in its English equivalent means to handle, to accomplish, to cope with something, to lead is to be understood as progress. Typical management tasks are plannable and predictable in their course and the achievement of objectives can be checked by more or less simple controlling. However, due to their nature, humans do not fit into this controllability.
From the point of view of systems theory, people are described in a self-referential manner. What comes out of this action is not one hundred percent predictable and certainly not externally controllable. People are not machines. And what the respective, individual reference mostly remains in the dark or at least in the penumbra. Everyone who has children or is in contact with them can certainly understand what is self-referential.
Leadership Mantra: Contact before Cooperation.
While standardized procedures can be used for management tasks, a resilient and clear leadership relationship is essential in leadership activities. This is the only way to make cooperation possible. An employment contract and a sophisticated job description only create a context but by no means lively cooperation. Anyone who as a leader has gone through one or the other interpersonal conflict will be able to understand that very well at this point. The mantra of every leader must therefore be contact before cooperation. Only a strong and clear leadership relationship gives the employee the necessary security to cooperate and perform.
In such an understanding of leadership, the focus is on the person to whom a leadership relationship is established and maintained via various approaches. It is the task and responsibility of the leader to ensure that this relationship works. “Good” leadership is therefore always geared towards the respective context and the people who move within it.
Following these thoughts, it becomes clear that leadership in practice has to be more multifaceted than the management literature wants to show us. That’s why it’s almost cute to assume that there is one style of leadership that leaders should conform to now and in the future. It is not a certain style that is decisive, but how willing you are to grow personally (as a leader). Because leadership close to people was and is the most intensive practical personal development that a leader can get.