Managers as leaders

I’ve been reading An Invented Life by Warren Bennis and really enjoying it. The overarching theme of the book is a look back on Bennis’ thinking and writing over the past 30 or so years. There’s a nice introduction by Tom Peters and a good preface by Bennis that sets up the rest of the book. Bennis, if you didn’t already know, is a smart dude.

Much of Bennis’ scholarship is centered around the idea of leadership and how it plays out in organizations. He occasionally spends time doing the standard manager vs leader comparison, but I find these to be terribly simplistic. It seems to me that the current definitions of leaders lean towards those at the tip of the organizational spear. The mind immediately thinks of C-level executives, but also folks like General Managers, etc. That seems like only a partial definition, though, since there are millions of managers who lead teams small and large. I think our definitions of leadership often leave them out in the cold when they set up either/or scenarios.

Good managers can be, and often are, good leaders. Yes, the two skill sets are distinct but individual managers can embody one or both attributes. What doesn’t seem to have been clearly articulated is that managers have some non-negotiable business to attend to: managing their staff and lines of business. In leadership literature, pure leaders seem to have been freed of the shackle of management duties in order to focus their attention on vision and synergies and The Goal (whatever that may be for that organization, during that leader’s tenure).

I’d love to see more concrete thinking and writing on what it means and how it looks when middle managers/line managers embody the attributes of both good management and good leadership. It sounds easy when I write it like that, but in my experience, there are often tensions between the two for managers in the middle of organizations. Sometimes the vision that middle leaders are tasked with articulating seems to violate the job they’re asked to do as managers. Staff aren’t dumb. They pick up on such inconsistencies immediately, which thereby threatens the manager’s newly found vision-articulation skills.

Anyway, this stuff troubles me and I plan on writing more about it, in more concrete terms. If for no other reason than to help me get my head around it. It’s 2:30am right now, though, and this angsty post isn’t helping me get any sleepier. I’ll be curious, when I re-read this in a few hours, whether this post is coherent at all…