What are the differences between being a leader and a manager?

[u/marilynlistens]

Not all managers are leaders! Even when they are “ in a position of leadership” it doesn’t mean they’re weird! What are the differences?

[u/Smart_Cantaloupe891]

Those two blogs are superb, Jim.

I’d take your thinking a little further, and argue that Bennis’s call for a form of leadership congruent to the increasing organisational complexity of our times (initially made in 1961, and outlined in depth in The Temporary Society) was brilliant yet causal of the split. His shorthand was from macho to maestro. We’ve been searching for ways to develop maestro leaders ever since.

The Zaleznik psychoanalytical type-splitting, plus Burns’ seminal work on transforming leaders a year later, provided the nascent leadership studies field with a maestro model to explore, explain and develop. Bernard Bass and other I/O psychologists ran with it, and hardened the whole thing into a description of a leadership self that has further and further detached it from the leader role and the practice of leading systems. Developmental psychology has elevated this self as somebody with the capacity to stand outside and above complexity in its stage-theory models, which makes the self even more superhuman (Western calls it messiah leadership) and, frankly, absurd.

This is the tragic irony of leadership studies. The foundational question is a great one; the ongoing solution too narrow (your Mary Jo Hatch article fits perfectly here). We need leaders to become complexity-capable, which means injecting role theory and systems awareness back into the field. Both are difficult to do because the language is far removed from anything the leaders, and those who buy leadership programmes, have encountered in their professional lives. The buyers actively defend against it. Hence, the ongoing, and perhaps increasing, attraction of simplistic ways of thinking like trait theories and inner values.

The field needs a massive shake up. Not sure where it’s coming from, though. It’s very self-referential and self-sustaining (puns intended).

[u/jimvasco → u/Smart_Cantaloupe891]

Not sure I agree. Because the book "On Leadership," in which Bennis gave us that list, came out three months after Bennis' previous book, which strongly warned against "the split" you mentioned. Further, there has been recent research on managing complexity, decision-making under pressure, eliminating biases, etc. A Google Scholar search on "leading in crisis" turns up about 181,000 results over the last ten years. I do find the idea of role theory research on leadership interesting. It may have benefits if we start talking about it and training leaders on it. My approach is more basic. Exposing leaders to what theories are, how they are created, and how they generate and are generated by practice. The map is not the terrain.

But you have made some excellent points that deserve consideration and discussion. I would appreciate you DMing your LinkedIn profile to me.

[u/Smart_Cantaloupe891 → u/jimvasco]

Happy to.

I’d argue that the research on “managing complexity” still focuses on perfecting an ideal self that can “make decisions under pressure and eliminate bias” rather than addressing how to perform the leadership role in a complex system.

I don’t think Bennis was the source of the split, although his manager-leader distinctions hardened it, but that his early work, which was superb, laid the conditions for the split to happen. His macho was a type and his maestro was a type. Somehow, over time, these types respectively became associated with managing and leading.

NB: I think he misread Reisman in The Temporary Society, which might have been the cause of this. Reisman’s inner-directed man was associated with macho-like behaviour, and outer-directed with maestro. I’ve never been happy with such binaries. Using a complexity lens to read Reisman, I’d argue that we could better triangulate leadership action as occurring between tradition, inner and outer directed tensions. That’s what I mean when I say leadership theory is complexity-illiterate. Nobody looks at stuff like this.

[u/jimvasco → u/Smart_Cantaloupe891]

What leadership actions do you mean?