Levels of Leadership

Discussions about leadership and management seem to focus on the mundane chores of management and the lofty achievements of leadership. A good manager is one who can accomplish what a leader envisions, plodding along with no real vision of their own, while a good leader has wonderful vision and an amazing grasp of all factors affecting success. Right? Maybe not. I may be exaggerating a little so let me clarify the issue by taking a look at three layers of leadership.

Leaders are often portrayed as the ones in the organization that have the vision and set the goals for the organization. While true, that's a somewhat narrow view. Leaders lead people, but they do that on different levels. Leadership can be divided into three broad categories. I exclude political leadership as it's completely separate, and often not really leadership.

Those commonly thought of as leaders occupy the c-suite; the CEOs, president, vice presidents, etc. Their jobs certainly do describe leadership, but they are also managers. For example, they manage events, finances, and production. As a rule though, in medium and large organizations, they don't have much to do with managing the human resource. Let me be clear on this point. These high level leaders deal with people every day, and the decisions they make certainly affect the organization's human resource. For the most part though, they don't manage people on a regular basis.

Below that level are the mid-level leaders. I lump everything from directors to plant managers making this a very large group. Titles are not as important as the fact that these leaders have the same sort of responsibilities of their higher level bosses, but also often have a little more responsibility for managing the human resource.

Next is what I think of as the entry level of leadership. This level of leadership is usually called a manager, though oddly enough such titles as shift leader and crew leader are also common. It's at this level of leadership that the definition of leader and manager clash. Those lofty definitions of leadership don't seem to apply here. Or do they? Let's look at a couple of examples.

Leaders are supposed to have vision; to know where they are going. No one talks about managers having vision. I've found though that the best managers were those who had a vision for what they wanted their own corner of the organization to be. That doesn't mean they had a corporate level vision, but rather one for their own area of responsibility. Likewise, managers are considered the ones who follow orders and do what they are directed by the leaders who have the ability to determine what that direction should be. Such a definition ignores two facts. First, leaders at all levels also follow. In fact, a leader who can't, or won't, follow is not a good leader. So, to be in a position that requires followership, does not lessen ones leadership role. Secondly, just because a person is in a lower level position does not mean they don't know what needs to be done, or what could be done better. I found my best success as a leader when my subordinate leaders felt empowered to make decisions and improvements based on their knowledge and expertise. Quite simply, they knew more than I did about their own specialties.

So what's the point of all this? The discussion of differences between leadership and management provides an interesting academic argument, but it does something else too. It clouds a very important fact. Specifically, leadership at all but the highest levels involves the human resource. The problem is, often those lower level managers, the ones who have the most responsibility for leading the human resource on a day-to-day basis, don't get much training in that aspect of their job. Remember that people, that human resource, expects to be managed, but they respond better when they are led.