Managing vs. Leading vs. Directing vs. Guiding vs. Coaching vs. Supervising vs. Perceptions

This article has been written by my friend, Gil Pizano and he has allowed me to publish it here. I would like to thank him for this. You may refer to his blog http://gilpizano.com/ 

A Few Words About Gil Pizano

He is a mem­ber of the man­age­ment group within the busi­ness intel­li­gence seg­ment of a major prop­erty and casu­alty insur­ance company. He has done his MBA from the Uni­ver­sity of Hartford’s Bar­ney School of Busi­ness along with a Bach­e­lor of Sci­ence in engi­neer­ing from the Uni­ver­sity of Hartford’s Col­lege of Engineering. He is a Mem­ber of the board of direc­tors for the Con­necti­cut chap­ter of the National Soci­ety of His­panic MBAs where he focuses on the orga­ni­za­tions mis­sion of “fos­ter­ing His­panic lead­er­ship through grad­u­ate man­age­ment edu­ca­tion and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment in order to improve society.” He is a found­ing mem­ber of a Toast­mas­ters group for a large inter­na­tional corporation’s employ­ees where he served on the organization’s board for three con­sec­u­tive years ensur­ing that a solid foun­da­tion was cre­ated in order for the group to be suc­cess­ful in achiev­ing the Toast­mas­ters mis­sion.

Man­ag­ing vs. Lead­ing. I’ve heard many things and read many arti­cles about being a man­ager ver­sus being a leader. At the same time there have been many arti­cles and sem­i­nars on what I’ll call the com­po­nents of a man­ager and the com­po­nents of a leader.

Being a leader. Is it the same as being a man­ager? Is being a good man­ager the same as being a good leader? What does coach­ing and the abil­ity to coach mean when it comes to being a good man­ager? When it comes to being a good leader? What does guid­ing have to do with lead­er­ship? With man­ag­ing With direct­ing? A man­ager has to know how to plan, orga­nize, direct and con­trol but a leader may not know how to plan, orga­nize, direct and con­trol. Yet they are still a leader!

Man­ag­ing vs. Lead­ing vs. Direct­ing vs. Guid­ing vs. Coach­ing vs. Supervising

What are some of the dif­fer­ences in the above? The mean­ings for many of them have some over­lap, but they are still words with dis­tinct mean­ing. Here are some def­i­n­i­tions for each (accord­ing to Word­Net):

Direct­ing: show­ing the way by con­duct­ing or lead­ing; impos­ing direc­tion on. “felt his mother’s direct­ing arm around him”; “the direc­tional role of sci­ence on indus­trial progress”

Guid­ing: direct the course; deter­mine the direc­tion of trav­el­ling; exert­ing con­trol or influ­ence; “a guid­ing principle”

Coach­ing: to teach and super­vise (some­one). The first use of the term coach­ing to mean an instruc­tor or trainer arose around 1830 in Oxford Uni­ver­sity slang for a tutor who “car­ries” a stu­dent through an exam.

Super­vis­ing: man­ag­ing by over­see­ing the per­for­mance or oper­a­tion of a per­son or group; under obser­va­tion or under the direc­tion of a super­in­ten­dent or over­seer; “super­vised play”.

Man­ag­ing: (in man­age­ment) the act of get­ting peo­ple together in order to accom­plish desired goals and objectives.

Lead­ing: (in man­age­ment) the process of social influ­ence in which one per­son can enlist the aid and sup­port of oth­ers in the accom­plish­ment of a com­mon task.

It’s easy to see from above that all the words really have a part in work­ing suc­cess­fully with a group. Sooner or later, every mem­ber of the group will per­son­ally be involved in per­form­ing one of the above. (In the scope of this post, I’m keep­ing a dis­tinct sep­a­ra­tion between “Man­age­ment” and “Man­ag­ing”. Why? Because, lead­er­ship / lead­ing is an intri­cate part of man­age­ment. But it is not the same as man­ag­ing.)

One say­ing I often hear is: “Man­agers do things right, while lead­ers do the right thing.”

This say­ing may be a lit­tle too bla­tant for my tastes, but it does shed a lit­tle light on the views of each type of posi­tion. It means that man­agers do things by the book and fol­low com­pany pol­icy, while lead­ers fol­low their own intu­ition, which may be more advan­ta­geous to the com­pany. Man­agers use author­i­tar­ian and trans­ac­tional style, which means sub­or­di­nates have to fol­low a manager’s orders while lead­ers use charis­matic and trans­for­ma­tional style, which means fol­low­ers are inspired to fol­low their leader’s wishes.

Unlike with man­agers, peo­ple fol­low a leader on their own choice but peo­ple have to obey a man­ager. In a way, a leader’s author­ity is derived from effec­tively bal­anc­ing the task of being a gen­uinely accepted mem­ber of a group, while hav­ing ade­quate detach­ment to con­stantly adjust the course the group is head­ing. Groups are also usu­ally more loyal to a leader than a man­ager because the leader is respon­si­ble in tak­ing the blame when things go wrong. When things go right, the leader is often last per­son to accept any recog­ni­tion for it. He/she often will rec­og­nize and thank the group for the success.

In the moti­va­tion depart­ment, a leader will often use pas­sions and incite emo­tions to moti­vate peo­ple. A man­ager on the other hand will not often use the lan­guage of emo­tions or pas­sions but more often use log­i­cal and offi­cial meth­ods to moti­vate peo­ple to com­plete a task. This is why lead­ers can be seen to be more emo­tional than a manager.

Risk

“Lead­ers stand out by being dif­fer­ent. They ques­tion assump­tion and are sus­pi­cious of tra­di­tion. They seek out the truth and make deci­sions based on fact, not prej­u­dice. They have a pref­er­ence for inno­va­tion.” — John Fen­ton

Lead­ers will often appear to be risk-seeking while man­agers may often appear to be more risk-averse. There­fore, man­agers look for com­fort and seek to avoid con­flict where pos­si­ble while lead­ers are com­fort­able with risk by find­ing ways oth­ers avoid and will­ing to break rules (within rea­son) in order to get things done.

Lead­er­ship. It’s really about coach­ing, guid­ing, and inspir­ing oth­ers to reach a goal. Some­times a leader will stand in front, some­times to the side, some­times even behind the peo­ple he or she is try­ing to help reach a goal.

Even if we don’t for­mally have any­one report­ing to us within an orga­ni­za­tion, we are still lead­ers because every­one in one form or another has the abil­ity to influ­ence oth­ers. So Where Do You Fit In? Man­ager or Leader? How do you see your­self? The deci­sion one makes about that will deter­mine where they go in an orga­ni­za­tion (and most likely the way they are seen as well).

Managing vs. Leading vs. Directing vs. Guiding vs. Coaching vs. Supervising vs. Perceptions