Henry Mintzberg is the antidote to that kind of unproductive thinking. He writes in a book simply titled Managing: “we should be seeing managers as leaders and leadership as management practiced well.” While I have maintained that there is value in separating the functions of managers and leaders for the better understanding of both, in practice, they shouldn’t be two different people. Mintzberg believes that managing is a practice that is learned on the job through apprenticeship, mentorship, and direct experience. He has good cause to assert that we should be more concerned about “macroleading;” people that manage by remote control; too far above it all. “We are now overlead and undermanaged", he writes.” 
It has become commonplace to regard managers as inferior to leaders. Leaders are out front getting things done and managers are … what are they doing? This is, in part, due of our proclivity to label people as one or the other.
"By obsessing over the glories of leadership, we lose our grasp on the realities of management. And our leadership is all the worse for it."
“The more we obsess about leadership, the less we seem to get.”
Managing is a page-turner (if you’re into this kind of thing). Mintzberg always makes you stop and think. He’s at his best when he’s leveling the playing field. As we’ve stressed on this blog before, leadership isn’t evolving. Leadership (and management) are a fundamental human activity. How they are practiced may change depending on the context, but their essence remains unchanged. Much of what we have to learn and relearn are fundamental principles regarding how people get along and work together.
Managers deal with different issues as time moves forward, but not with different managing. The job does not change. We buy new gasoline all the time and new shirts from time to time; that does not mean that car engines and buttons have been changing. Despite the great fuss we make about change, the fact is that basic aspects of human behavior—and what could be more basic than managing and leading?—remain rather stable.
Mintzberg has distilled management thought into a general model of managing—what do managers do? They operate on three plains of activity, from the conceptual to the concrete: They act through information. They work through people. They manage action directly. And they need to operate on all three planes. “Too much leading can result in a job free of content…and detached from its internal roots.” A blending of all three planes into a dynamic balance is required and is best learned on the job. “No simulation I have ever seen in a classroom … comes remotely close to replicating the job itself,” says Mintzberg.
Read the rest of the review from Michael McKinney on the Leadership Now blog ...
Hi Mick,
ReplyDeleteI am so glad you wrote about this because it is a real issue that adversely impacts performance and profits. In what way?
As a leadership and management coach I've discovered that position labels, such a manager, supervisor can (if not aware and most aren't) block our ability to access and use other talents and skills that need to be tapped in certain situations.
Labels or titles also block us from understanding a basic fact, it's all about behavior. Leading is a behavior as is managing, as is supervising.
The key to overcoming this?...ask what behaviors are needed to get the outcomes desired.
My discovery in being exposed to thousands of managers and leaders across North America, is that there are many managers that are amazing leaders and leaders that need to be managing more to increase their effectiveness as leaders.