The tl;dr is that management is a set of powers and accountabilities that the role confers upon you, whereas leadership is the ability to motivate followers. Anyone can be a leader, and teams run on leadership not management. Management is not necessarily bad, but management without leadership is pretty dang terrible! Also management is like the nervous system of an octopus.

What Management Is

One way to look this topic is by examining what managers can do that non-manager leaders can’t. Managers are given authority: a little toolbox of powers that come with the role. This toolbox contains, to some extent, the power to:

  • Define roles and responsibilities
  • Assign roles to people (this includes promotions, and assigning people to projects)
  • Make formal performance evaluations
  • Hire people
  • Fire people
  • Administer company resources (approving leave, L&D budgets, etc.)

But that’s only half of the story. The other half is why managers get this toolbox, and what the tools are actually used for. The other half of management is the set of accountabilities that come with the role.

Accountabilities are different from responsibilities. Individual contributors (i.e. non-managers) are usually responsible for work — that is, they have an obligation to perform the relevant tasks personally. Managers are usually not responsible for work, but instead accountable for the outcomes of their team, meaning that they are held liable or answerable for the consequences of the team’s work.

How can managers be held accountable for other people’s work? Well that’s why they get given their little toolbox of powers. They define, assign, evaluate, hire, and fire in order to meet their accountabilities. This is how managers can be held accountable for the actions of the people that they manage. In the event that something goes wrong with the team, it’s perfectly legitimate to ask whether roles and responsibilities were clear, whether the right people were assigned to the right things, whether performance was being evaluated properly, and so on.

Exactly what those accountabilities are varies from role to role, organisation to organisation, and even quarter to quarter, but there is a common theme. Every manager is accountable for a subset of their own managers’ accountabilities. Starting at the top of the organisation, where the CEO (or whoever) is accountable for literally everything, those accountabilities get divided and spread across the executives one step down the org chart, and then divided and spread again at every level, all the way down to the bottom.

In some ways, management is like the central nervous system of the organisation. Signals ripple out from the brain through all the branching nerve pathways (middle management) until they reach the individual muscle fibers (the individual contributors) that then contract (actually do the work) in coordination. The CNS allows for complex coordinated behaviours like walking, talking, hunting, and making art, which wouldn’t be possible if all the muscle fibers were just spasming independently. Also, signals are sent in the reverse direction back to the brain (feedback), like sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell, to be used as input for future decisions. It’s not a perfect analogy because managers aren’t blindly conveying orders from above, or at least they shouldn’t be. But have a look at octopuses. They have a distributed nervous system where each arm is capable of independent thought. That’s pretty dope.

As a final note on management, I want to make it clear that I’m not attempting to describe how to manage well, I’m only trying to describe the structure of the role. Covering your accountabilities as a manager involves more than just defining, assigning, hiring, and firing, as we’ll soon see.

What Leadership Is

In my mind, the definition of leadership is pretty simple. You’re a leader if people follow you. And “follow” implies being willing, without being forced or coerced.

Authority and the little toolbox of manager powers does not make you a leader. In fact, per my definition above, exercising managerial authority to force people to do what you want is categorically not leadership.

Leadership is motivating people without the use of authority. It’s speaking up, having an opinion, and making a recommendation. It’s involving people in the process and giving them a sense of ownership. It’s understanding what people find motivating and what demotivates them. It’s seeking consent and consensus. It’s letting other people make decisions and have autonomy over their work. It’s setting a good example for others. It’s a bunch of stuff like that.

Leadership doesn’t require any special authority or credentials. Anyone can (and should) do it. If you say “I want to do X” and someone else says “I’ll help out” then congratulations you’re a leader.

It’s not limited by organisational hierarchy. People can (and should) lead their managers. People can lead people in other teams. Make a good recommendation to the Chief Whatever Officer — boy howdy that’s a leadership right there.

Management Without Leadership

Another way to look at this topic is to consider what one looks like without the other. Let’s start with management without leadership.

Management without leadership is a bit of a hellish situation to be on the receiving end of. It’s basically the attitude of “you do whatever I tell you to do, because I’m the boss”.

In the best case scenario, your manager has defined your role so completely and in detail that you’re able to perform well by blindly following rules without thinking, and they have been merciful enough to make those rules somewhat fair.

In the worst case scenario, your manager tries to cover their accountabilities with a simple tactic of exercising their authority or threatening to. They see no need to be fair or considerate, or even to communicate much. Management are hypocrites, openly flouting the rules they impose on everyone else. You’re never asked your opinion or involved in decisions that affect you, which means your job is a series of unpleasant surprises. Your team operates on a culture of fear. You are held responsible for things you didn’t know you were responsible for, and it’s important to shift blame if you want to stay. People either learn to keep their head down, or quit, or get fired. Your manager takes a sink-or-swim approach to people, where they are thrown into the job with little to no support, and they either work it out themselves or they get replaced. Everyone kinda hates the job, but that’s what jobs are like, right?

One of the euphemisms I don’t like is “leadership team”. This usually refers to one manager and all their direct reports, somewhere near the top of the org chart, and is a name that they have given to themselves. The autocratic self-designation of being leaders is kind of the opposite of what leadership is. If nobody in the organisation considers themselves followers of this team, and only does what they say because they feel forced to, then at best they are a “management team”.

In the short-term, it’s much easier to make decisions without input and then tell people after the fact. That’s why sometimes you’ll see otherwise-decent leaders lose their ability to lead when put under too much stress or pressure, becoming more autocratic. In my opinion, this is a decent signal for detecting when someone’s workload is getting to be too much.

Leadership Without Management

Looking at the reverse, leadership without management is great!

A super high-functioning team could work almost entirely without management. Team members could seek direction and goals from leaders in the organisation, define their own roles and responsibilities, self-select into those roles, and then hold each other to a high standard of performance. Heck, they could even identify when hiring was needed, and who would be a good fit. This would require abnormally strong leadership from team members, so it’s not common, but it’s possible.

For managers, leading reports can sometimes be hard, and it always takes time, but it results in better outcomes than relying on authority. Pretty much every time you exercise authority you’re destroying trust in some way. That’s why managers should start with leadership in basically every situation, and only use authority as a last resort. Most people want to do a good job, and it’s usually not that hard to motivate them.

Personally, as an engineering manager, I’m always looking for engineers with leadership skills. I aim to build teams that can function without me, and that’s not possible if I’m the only source of leadership. I want technical leads: engineers that can lead other engineers to deliver projects. I want good retro participants, who actively identify ways of working that could be better, suggest changes, get consensus, and then implement those changes. I want people who can run meetings, talk to stakeholders, and make good decisions without me.

If I had to find ways leadership can cause problems without management I could maybe come up with a few specific scenarios, but they’re not that common and not that bad. It’s not something I worry about at all.

Conclusion

If a team is working well, there’s really nothing too special about the manager. Sure, the manager has authority to do some things that the rest of the team can’t, but won’t actually be exercising that authority if things are going well. Teams run on leadership not management, at least the good ones do, and everyone in the team can (and should) lead.