Leadership vs. Management: Why Every Manager Should Lead

Leadership development shouldn’t only apply to senior managers stepping into executive roles. The right senior leadership is crucial, of course. But throughout the business, there are many times more employees holding management positions, and those people have an extraordinary day-to-day impact on the organisation. 

Leadership shouldn’t be the sole domain of the big Cs, Heads of, and Directors. All managers must learn to lead – because when you create a culture of leadership, you build a more engaged, more productive workforce who deliver better ideas, happier customers, and ultimately, more profit.

Let’s explore that. 

Leadership vs. management: what’s the difference?

The difference between leaders and managers isn’t seniority. Equipped with the right tools and support, first-time managers can develop fast into leaders. Likewise, some senior ‘leaders’ do little to deserve the name. 

The CIPD put the difference this way: ‘leadership is seen to involve developing an initial vision and inspiring others to achieve such vision, while management involves translating the vision into reality by guiding the actions and behaviours of a team.’ 

Although most managers today have evolved beyond the top-down command and control style of one hundred years ago, there’s still an ocean between leadership and management. 

Managers instruct; leaders influence. Managers enforce; leaders empower. That’s worth aspiring to at every level, from team leader to C-Suite.

Let’s talk about why transforming your managers – even those just starting their management career – into leaders is so important. 

Managers could be why your EX spend isn’t paying off

Over the past few years, employee experience has become a big – and expensive – priority for most businesses. For example, Deloitte links the UK productivity slump to poor performance on EX, finding that half of UK organisations are ineffective at creating a positive work experience. 

There are lots of reasons employee experience initiatives fail – but dedicated focus on upskilling your managers could be an important missing link. 

For example, a Department for Business Innovation and Skills paper on leadership and management in the UK reports that nearly three quarters of organisations in England suffer from a deficit of management and leadership skills.

And according to a recent survey by Visier, 43% of UK employees have left a job because of a bad manager. On the flipside, 38% have stayed in a job longer than they intended because of a good manager – so the stakes are exceptionally high.

Great people leaders have a huge impact on your people’s experience at work – but in many cases, there’s major room to improve. A YouGov and MHR survey found 80% of employees have experienced a poor manager at least once in their career, for example.

That has a huge impact, not just on your people, but on the whole business. 

Managers who lead are critical for organisational health

Managers have a disproportionate impact on your organisation because engagement quickly ladders into more tangible outcomes – like customer satisfaction, productivity, profitability and turnover. You’d be hard pushed to find four better measures of overall organisational health. 

So strong is this link that the Department for Business Innovation and Skills say bad management from company directors causes 56% of corporate failures. And on the flipside, best-practice management development can increase organisational performance by 23%. Even more impressive, the same report concludes that a single point improvement in management practices (rated on a five-point scale) is associated with the same increase in output as a 25% increase in the labour force or a 65% percent increase in invested capital. 

So we’re left with this: organisational health rests on employee engagement, and employee engagement rests on great manager relationships. Empowering your managers to lead, then, is one of the most important things you can do for the business.

But getting there, of course, is easier said than done. Large-scale organisational change, which is what’s needed, can be daunting – but McKinsey’s influence model is a helpful framework, outlining four building blocks of change:

• Fostering understanding and conviction
• Role modelling
• Developing talent and skills
• Reinforcing with formal mechanisms

Let’s look at how that framework can apply to developing your managers into leaders. 

Set your vision 

We’re not talking here about developing a handful of senior managers into leadership positions, but about widespread change across the organisation impacting everyone who manages people. You need your new junior managers on board as much as your hardened management pros. For most organisations, that demands culture change. 

Treat this as the large change project it is. Devote resources, galvanise support from the top and communicate your vision outwards. Everyone in the business should understand the management culture you’re trying to create.

Educate, train and coach

To become leaders, your managers need practical support and opportunities to develop and flex the right skills. Tom Roth, COO of Wilson Learning, says ‘You manage things and you lead people. Leading is more about encouraging people to grow and reach their potential and make connections between what they contribute and the larger purpose.’ He emphasises the need for personalised training for different management levels, whether for new managers, first-level managers moving to mid-level or mid-level moving to executive.

Leadership – although always characterised by influence and empowerment rather than control and command – looks different at different levels. This means your people will need support to build different skills and capabilities throughout their career.

Evaluate your processes and policies 

Your formal processes, structures and policies must support the changes you’re asking your managers to make. 

Performance management is a big factor in this context. If your managers’ performance is only measured against their output as an employee, or against hard metrics like team revenue, you disincentivise change. Incentivise your managers to lead by integrating, say, team feedback scores into evaluations.

Prompt the leadership team to model the right behaviours 

Leaders play a crucial role in creating a culture of manager-leaders. As one study concludes, ‘leaders strongly shape their followers’ beliefs. Leaders are ‘role models’ and ‘belief managers’. 

Ultimately, the end goal is for every manager to be a leader, but this change must start from the top. The leadership team must embody the changes you want other managers to embody. That’s why this change project must start with galvanising support from the top. 

Examine who you hire

Most of these tactics are about building leadership skills among your existing managers. But really, this process starts even earlier, with the people you bring into the business. 

There’s a heap of debate about whether leaders are made or born. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle. One study quantifies the balance as 70/30 – with a 30% genetic component to leadership. Whatever the exact balance, though, the point is, you need to consider who you’re starting with. If you’re not hiring people with leadership potential, you’ll struggle to build a leadership culture. 

Conclusion

DDI’s 2021 Global Leadership Forecast found that only 11% of organisations have a strong or very strong leadership bench. Given success rates for executives hired internally are 25% higher than external hires, boosting organisational leadership skills is a laudable aim. 

That starts with developing a culture of leadership starting at the bottom of the pyramid, cultivating leadership qualities among all your managers. Even the newest team leader should lead, not just manage.