Leadership Relies on Management Skills

You lead people and you manage things. This is the accepted axiom and implies that leadership and management go hand-in-hand. Management is a function and deals with supervision and exercising control, while leadership is about relationships and influence and inspiration. Before one can become an effective leader in an organization, one must first be an effective manager.

The manager is responsible for setting goals and achieving objectives. In doing so, he performs four basic functions. Developing the skills associated with these functions are crucial to the effectiveness of a leader:

• Planning
• Organizing
• Directing
• Controlling

Planning is basically bringing the future into the present so you can do something about it now. Planning is concerned with defining goals for future organizational performance and deciding on tasks and resources to be used to attain those goals. To meet the goals, managers will invest significant resources for training and incentives (i.e. rewards) to motivate employees.

The leader soon learns that motivation is more than incentives. Motivating subordinates is a key leadership principle and represents the greatest challenge. Motivating people depends on understanding their needs and working to align those needs with organizational requirements. Most people will work for an organization they know cares for them, and one in whose mission they believe. The most powerful form of lasting motivation is self-motivation. In developing plans and laying incentives, the leader will provide an environment that fosters and rewards self-motivation.

Organizing involves arranging the necessary resources to carry out the plan. It is the process of creating structure, establishing relationships and allocating resources to accomplish the goals of the organization. Organizing has to do with setting priorities and team building. It is also moving people and things from one task or one place to another as the plan unfolds and the mission is accomplished.

As managers become leaders they realize organizing means to resist averting attention from the unpriortized demands of their telephone calls, in-boxes and meeting and travel schedules. Leaders have the opportunity to structure their own schedules to a certain degree. Those leaders focus on the big picture and empower their subordinates to carry out the details of the mission. They spend time with their employees in the trenches and lead from the front. The leader learns to sacrifice personal requirements or comfort for the people and the mission.

Directing, in management terms, involves conducting or regulating the affairs of the organization. The manager must learn how to direct personnel to carry out the mission. This is accomplished through the manager’s legitimate authority and subordinates are compelled to respond accordingly. An employee will perform a task because the “boss told me to,” but this is possibly more based on fear (e.g. losing his or her job) than a true desire to perform the task.

The leader builds upon this function and influences his or her subordinates through earned authority. People complete assigned tasks out of a sense of loyalty to the leader and the organization. A leader understands that loyalty is a three-dimensional trait that includes faithfulness to superiors, peers and subordinates. Before a leader can expect his employees to be loyal, he must first demonstrate an unquestionable sense of loyalty. General George S. Patton highlighted the importance of loyalty by saying, “There is a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and mush less prevalent.”

Controlling involves verifying that actual performance matches the plan. This is accomplished through the implementation of a decision methodology and feedback to measure the achievement of organizational goals. To accomplish this task, he will study accounting and other reports and compare them to the plans set earlier. These comparisons may show where operations are not proceeding as planned and who is responsible for what. The feedback the manager receives may suggest the need to replan, to set new strategies or to reshape the organizational structure.

Simply put, the manager knows his job and understands the organization. This is important to the leader because people will follow a competent person who has the knowledge needed to successfully meet organizational goals. The leader should have a broad view of the organization’s mission, and must ensure all personnel understand how their jobs relate to the achievement of organizational goals.

Just as important as their own competence, leaders ensure people know their responsibilities. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell D. Taylor stated, “One expects a … leader to demonstrate in his daily performance a thorough knowledge of his or her own job and further an ability to train his subordinates in their duties and thereafter to supervise and evaluate their work.”

As you can see, leaders build on the skills they learned performing the functions of management. The ability to manage an organization effectively is instrumental to becoming an effective leader. Hence, leaders can be managers, but managers can’t always be leaders. Leadership relies on management skills.