Leaders, Managers, and Minions

The apocryphal shrill uttered from the crystal palace or the rarefied mystic glow of a Webex call as it opens in a company-wide town hall……“Everyone needs to be a safety leader! We all take ownership of our safety and by extension, of our team members around us!” And while the moment sometimes devolves into mundane examples such as, Don’t walk around with your hands in your pockets, or Don’t lean back in your chair or, Don’t leave that extension cord laying around in the conference room…. well, you get the idea. Sometimes the moments are gratuitous, to say the least, but bless their hearts, it’s in the right place after all. And before you know it, a culture of safety sets in. Yes, even the Boomers (like me) might be caught wearing safety glasses and ear plugs while cutting the grass. That’s not something I did when I was 10 years old but somehow my new safety leadership rubbed off on my son and in an epiphany one Sunday afternoon amongst the nostalgic smell of cut grass, you see it in real time.

Let’s face it, nobody says, “Look at Bob over there wearing his safety glasses and pouring that elixir of timethyldeath into a beaker…what a safety MANAGER! Nope, Bob is a safety LEADER. Safety is an easy way to point out that we all aspire to leadership, not management. Right? The safety leader is the superman with a cape and the safety manager is Clark Kent. Sort of the same guy but who wants to be Clark when they can be the man himself? There’s a dichotomy of functionality we miss in these timeless childhood aspirations living within us all.

Leader means something. It means setting a standard, a cause worth following. Teaching us something we didn’t know before or installing a passion for accomplishing a task that might otherwise be rote, mundane and trivial. We all aspire to find our leader, the mentor that advances our goals. Managers can’t do none of that, can they? We aspire to excellence because of leadership and managers get a bad rap. Managers don’t lead us; they just review our time sheets or give us flack over errors on an expense report. They reprimand us for failing to meet a deadline or spending too much on a task that should have been 1/10th the cost, or so they thought. And it can cause a contemptuous feeling because “that dude that manages me couldn’t do half my job”.

While there are a tons articles written by (usually, starch shirt academic business pundits) about what differentiates leaders from manager, yours truly of course has come to terms with the differences based on some time spent in the field and I’d like to share. It’s not that my wrinkled flannel, spotted high vis vest and half-shaven look gives me any more authoritative take on the subject, but it does gives me a few degrees of separation from the talks that use a lot of air, none of which seems to make it to the polished PowerPoint presenter’s brain.

And here’s a spoiler – we need both leaders and manager to get things done and our roles as manager and leaders shift and adapts every day, depending on the task, our subject matter expertise and our ability to do the impossible, manage people. Technical problems are hard enough but managing people is darn near impossible. Leaders hate to manage, and managers would rather not have to lead us out of a crisis. But within our being, both live in harmony and rise to the occasion, when needed.

Stay tuned in upcoming posts as I attempt to unwrap the differences and explain why managers are leaders are equally critical components to a properly run business with God-Willing, strategic vision and tactical plans that are more likely to succeed than a rainbow in the dark.