Is there a difference between leading and managing? A couple of great articles by Bob Sutton at Stanford and Thomas Davenport and Stephen Harding of Towers Watson, explore what it means to be an awesome boss. One common theme: process plays a role, but pay close attention to your people.

Leading vs Managing: A False Choice

On the Management Innovation Exchange (MIX), Bob Sutton of Good Boss, Bad Boss fame, explores the distinction between managing and leading. He read thousands and thousands of pages of practical and academic literature (!) on leadership and management and came up with this advice: “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.”

What Dr. Sutton is saying is that the best, most effective leaders are the ones who don’t just dream and delegate but who get deep into the details. They do a mix of managing and leading: “I am not rejecting the distinction between leadership and management, but I am saying that the best leaders do something that might properly be called a mix of leadership and management.”

It’s just too easy for people in leadership positions to get caught up in what they think their role should be, and lose sight of the details altogether:

“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 that they lead, the technologies their companies use, and the customers they serve.”

If you’re delegating from the hip, without an understanding of who and what’s involved, you’re putting team morale and motivation at risk (and your credibility as a leader). Dr. Sutton gives examples from his book The Knowing-Doing Gap in which project managers suffered this fate:  “When they couldn’t succeed because of absurd deadlines, tiny staffs, small budgets, and in some cases, because it simply wasn’t technically possible to do what the leaders wanted, they were blamed. ”

The Secret of Management: Learning How to Manage More by Managing Less

On TLNT, Thomas Davenport and Stephen Harding also differentiate managing from leading:

“For example, a supervisor who involves employees in deciding how work will get done must focus both on the process (a managerial task) and the person (a leadership activity). By crafting a job with high autonomy for an employee, she is practicing both one-person-at-a-time leadership and managing the improvement of work processes.”

Davenport and Harding describe the boss’ role as facilitator and enabler, often acting behind the scenes: “Rather than power over, a manager who effectively leads from offstage will focus energy on power to — to obtain resources, to clear obstacles, to build network links, and to identify information sources.”

The best boss’ get to know their teams – what each person is good at, where they can contribute and what they need to develop. They know how to bring people together and align around goals without being overbearing. Davenport and Harding found that this is what people want from a leader:

“Our analysis of employee commentary about their managers tells us that people want managers to spend the right amount of person-to-person time (not too much, not too little) and make the time valuable for the employee (whether gratifying to the manager or not). Managers who strike this balance give people the ability and the confidence needed to work autonomously.”

To Davenport and Harding, the “managerial balancing act” comes from combining process with people. Unfortunately, it’s harder for most than it may seem: “Although we find this configuration of elements logical and compelling, we continue to see that, from the employee perspective at least, managers often fail to deliver the full benefits of this way of managing.”

One thing you can do to get ahead of the game is start developing leaders early. Another: pay attention.

Photo of yellow arrow with people by lumaxart. Licensed under CC.