Leading Vs Managing

In his famous book Learning to Lead: A Workbook on Becoming a Leader, Warren Bennis shared a strong perspective that

There is a profound difference between management and leadership, and both are important. To manage means to bring about, to accomplish, to have charge of or responsdibility for, to conduct. Leading is influencing, guiding in a direction, course, action, opinion. The distinction is crucial. Managers are people who do things right and Leaders are people who do the right thing

This perspective reflects an old and popular distinction of 'Leading' vs 'Managing', which can be applied usefully, but which can also bring with it negative consequences in terms of how some Leaders view and conduct their roles. Indeed, Robert Sutton, in a recent Harvard Blog Post True Managers are also Leaders described these possible consequences as

Some leaders now see their job as just coming up with big and vague ideas, and they treat implementing them, or even engaging in conversation and planning about the details of them as mere "management" work. Worse still, this distinction seems to be used as a reason for leaders to avoid the hard work of learning about the people they lead, the technologies their companies use and the customers they serve.

The worst senior executives use the distinction between leadership and management as an excuse to avoid the details they really have to master to see the big picture and select the right strategies. The best leaders do something that might properly be called a mix of leadership and management. To do the right thing, a leader needs to understand what it takes to do things right, and to make sure they actually get done

FranklinCovey's approach falls on the 'Sutton side' of the debate. In terms of 'setting the direction', our Great Leaders curriculum provides the concepts for conceiving a vision and insights into establishing a purpose. However, at the same time we emphasise the importance of a leader's role in understanding and aligning systems ('doing things right') with a particular focus on conducting Talent audits, measuring Customer feedback, inputting to the design of core Work Processes and enabling the Discipline of Execution throughout an organisation so that the leader and everyone down to the front line is responsible for the detail of translating high level strategy into tangible results.