Leadership and Management

LEADERSHIP CORNER

Leadership or Management? Why being a "good manager"

might not be the best career goal. Don Marker

GO to Amazon.com and search for books on the subject of "Leadership,"and you will get over 59.000 hits. If you do the same search under"Management" you will get more than 590.000 hits. Is there that much more to say about management?

Obviously, there are a lot of authors who think so. Yet the more complex

and difficult of the two concepts is leadership, which may be why there is such

a significant difference between the number of people who have attempted to

tackle the more challenging topic.

In hisbookTheEssenceof Leadership. Authör Mac Anderson states:

"Leadership is a complicated topic, because there are probably as

many definitions of leadership as there are leaders in the world. That's

because a leader is a person with many roles...CEO. soldier, coach,

entrepreneur, department head, politician, teacher, minister...as well

as parent, spouse, and other personal roles. History has identified

many qualities and characteristics of great leaders, and. of course, no

person embodies them all. But the great leaders I've known, or read

about, have one simple thing in common: They have developed their

leadership styles around their personalities and their values, and in

the end, their actions are consistent with what they truly believe."

Before diving further into this distinction between Leadership and

Management consider a series of questions. For many years I have been

fortunate enough to facilitate a session at NRECA's Robert I. Kabat Management

Internship Program (MIP). now held in Madison, Wl. The subject matter of my

session includes things like board/management relations, what it is like to be

a GM/CEO of an electric cooperative, as well as various aspects of leading and

Leadership Corner | 31

managing at the senior level. Each year I ask the MIP participants the same series

of questions:

• How many of you strive to be a good manager (at any level) at work?

• How many of you strive to be a good leader within your cooperative?

• What is the difference?

If you are reading this it is likely that you either work within an electric

cooperative or with an organization that is somehow related to the cooperative

industry. So, consider the same series of questions relative to your career with

your organization.

The responses to these questions that 1 nearly always get with the MIP

groups are as follows:

• Strive to be a good manager? Nearly all hands go up.

• Strive to be a good leader? Around two-thirds ofthe hands go up.

• What is the difference? Dead silence. Alt hands down on the tables.

The MIP participants really struggle to identify the differences even though

they desire to be seen as both good managers and good leaders.

So, are there really any differences between the two approaches to working

within our organizations? If there are differences do they actually matter or are

they important?

Both literature and experience establish that there are major differences

between management and leadership, and those differences are critically

important. Over the years, I have heard several versions of how people look at

management versus leadership but the one that has stuck with me is this:

• A good manager gets others to do what he/she wants them to do.

• A good leader gets others to want what he/she wants.

Similar phraseology, to be sure, but the meaning behind them is vastly

different. A manager relies on position, power and authority to direct the actions

and/or conduct of subordinate employees. The manager is better at telling his/

her employees what tasks to do with little time spent on the why.

A leader, on the other hand, utilizes a totally different set of skills including

persuasion, communication, shared vision, values, logic and even, at times,

emotion. The leader is great at explaining why something needs to be

accomplished and then empowers those responsible to get it done. Rarely will a

good leader provide specific direction on how to accomplish the task. The priority

of leadership communication is focused on what needs to be accomplished and

why doing so is important.

In many respects, fully embracing the leadership model is much more

32 I MANAGEMENT QUARTERLY Summer 2010

difficult and time consuming than simply using the more traditional management model. In the management model, you tell your empioyees what they need to do. If they ask 'why'-you simply make it clear that you are the boss and they need to do what you say. Period. That approach usually takes very little time and the manager can make the instructions and be on his/her merry way. Leadership though, requires a significant investment of time on the front end of the assignment. It takes time to describe your vision of what needs to be accomplished, and also explain why it is important to the organization. However, the rewards on the "back end" of the leadership model are vast. When your fellow employees share a common vision with you and truly strive to reach the same goals as you have they can be amazingly resourceful and productive. The day-to-day oversight of employees who share a common vision under the leadership model is minimal. In the management model, employees need to be directly supervised on a day-to-day and task-by-task basis.

So, will the leadership model

actually work in the real world of electric When vour fellow cooperative day-to-day operations? Or in employees share a fact, does the supervisor need to closely " . . .,

, „ ..., t £ common vision with monitor and manage the performance of his/her employees? you and truly strive to

The leadership model will absolutely reach the same goals work in the day-to-day cooperative world QS you have they can be and, if applied correctly, will be greatly amazingly resourceful and successful.

Here's why. productive. For the most part we (electric cooperatives) are very fortunate to have

employees who are dedicated, competent, professional and, in most cases. highly driven to succeed. If provided the right sense of direction and purpose from their "leader" they will respond in ways that will not only impress you but make you very proud as well. I have seen this employee response in my current organization and others where I have been and can assure you that the results can be nothing short of amazing.

And the good leaders—the ones who inspire individuals to self-start, stretch and achieve great things—may not be who you think.

I recall, many years ago, a relatively young man who was being considered for a GM/CEO position. The cooperative had a very exhaustive "screening" process for the applicants. He was eventually "short-listed" and was one of only two

Leadership Corner | 33

finalists being considered for the job. The cooperative sent both finalists to a

rather targe city to meet with a very well known and high powered "Management

Evaluation Firm" for psychological profiling. This turned out to be a day long

session full of multiple choice questions, fill in the blank sentences, color and

shape identifications and so on and so on.

When the results came back, the overall conclusion was that he really

didn't have the right personality to be a good manager. His assertive skill level

was only moderate. Of course, it needed to be strong. His "soft skills", on the

other hand, were high, but those aren't necessarily what a good command and

control manager needs. So. the job went to the other person who had a strong

"management" profile. He, of course, was crushed.

But that's not the end of the story. Because that young man, so man years

ago, was me.

What i didn't realize at the time was that I never really wanted to be a good

manager. But I did. in fact, possess ail the qualities needed to provide sound

leadership. Most of us do. Especially if we recognize what is necessary and are

willingto workat it.

You only need to look at the shelves at your local bookstore to confirm that

there has been much written and studied about management and leadership.

In one such study provided by Corporate Adventures, employees were surveyed

and asked to identify the qualities that they most admired in people they

considered to be leaders. Twenty different leadership qualities were tabulated

from that study. The top four were honesty, forward-looking, competent and

inspiring. These are qualities that we can all relate to and, for the most part, are

fully capable of bringing to our own organizations.

We don't necessarily need to be charismatic, good looking or wealthy in

order to bring meaningful leadership skills to our jobs and even personal lives

every day. We simply need to understand the important differences between

management and leadership and be willing to invest the time and energy

needed to implement the leadership model in our cooperatives.

Don Marker has been the General Manager/CEO of Sioux

Valley Energy at Colman, South Dakota since May of 1999.

He has been a faculty member of the NRECA Management

Internship Program (MIP) for the past seven years, and

holds a BA degree in economics and an MBA degree from

Washburn University in Topeka. Kansas.

34 I MANAGEMENT QUARTERLY I Summer 2010

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