Accidental line managers. Discuss...

I have a long-term philosophical disagreement with my colleagues in L&D (which has stretched across my last four employers) as to the difference between "management" and "leadership".

To my mind, "management" is relatively simple. It describes the tasks a person must perform in order to ensure that those placed subordinate to them are provided the resources they need to do their job. These tasks are not difficult and include things such as signing off holiday requests, approving expenses, tracking sickness absence, undertaking risk assessments...

They aren't difficult, but they are time consuming when you're unfamiliar with the processes. But most people of basic competence can do "management" if they are given the tools they need, such as procedural documents and guides to the tasks of management.

Management is an eminently learnable skill.

I wrote in another thread recently that companies seem to have shifted over the last three decades away from investing in management skills because business leaders in FTSE500 companies and their ilk are focused on outcomes other than the simply maximisation of profits. Given Steve's prompt here, I would go so far as to say that companies have increasingly emphasized leadership over management to the general detriment of their employees.

As a graduate of the Royal Military Academy, I was relentlessly drilled in the Army's distinction between the two: that leadership is the ability to command moral authority under pressure and to use that authority to pull or push group members towards the accomplishment of a task that, without the leader, they would not pursue. When facing oncoming fire this is, as you can imagine, a valuable skill in the pursuit of military objectives.

But away from such binary dichotomies, in the world of business, leadership can be as much a force for destruction as creation. Leaders will persuade staff to sacrifice their personal lives, to give up remote working, to deliver unpaid overtime, to ignore their holiday rights, to work through sickness... all in pursuit of goals that are, at best, nebulous and, at worst, in the interests of stakeholders that do not include the wellbeing of the workers.

It is in this world that HR ends up being the substitute manager who - as much in thrall to the leader as anyone else - takes on the tasks of management in support of the leader-who-will-not-manage. And that assumes that you have a leader who is actually able to lead and inspire. But if the culture of the company prioritises leadership without actually training for leadership (leadership is also a learnable skill, albeit nothing like as easy as management), you end up with people who are either neither leaders nor managers or, worst of all, who *think* they are leaders-who-will-not-manage but who are in fact sociopaths-who-will-not-manage.

The thing is management is always useful, but leadership is really only useful in a crisis. Staff are much more interested in knowing if the roster has been updated, if their holiday has been approved or whether they can swift shifts so they can go home early on Friday - which is all management. Leadership only matters when suddenly you're three staff down with a tight deadline and the server just crashed. But if you have a leader-who-will-not-manage, they are motivated to create or seek out crises where their skills are useful in order to conceal their failure to deliver the management for which they are actually paid.

Meanwhile (in this rambling monologue) we should address one of my favourite topics: the Peter Principle.

The promotion of good people to their point of incompetence is an axiom of management development. But it has been treated as a self-fulfilling prophecy when, in fact, it was really just a rallying call for better investment in management training. There is no reason to believe that good people will inevitably become incompetent if their employer continually invests in their development in skills that are - and I cannot emphasize this enough - *not difficult to acquire*.

I have a long-term philosophical disagreement with my colleagues in L&D (which has stretched across my last four employers) as to the difference between "management" and "leadership".

To my mind, "management" is relatively simple. It describes the tasks a person must perform in order to ensure that those placed subordinate to them are provided the resources they need to do their job. These tasks are not difficult and include things such as signing off holiday requests, approving expenses, tracking sickness absence, undertaking risk assessments...

They aren't difficult, but they are time consuming when you're unfamiliar with the processes. But most people of basic competence can do "management" if they are given the tools they need, such as procedural documents and guides to the tasks of management.

Management is an eminently learnable skill.

I wrote in another thread recently that companies seem to have shifted over the last three decades away from investing in management skills because business leaders in FTSE500 companies and their ilk are focused on outcomes other than the simply maximisation of profits. Given Steve's prompt here, I would go so far as to say that companies have increasingly emphasized leadership over management to the general detriment of their employees.

As a graduate of the Royal Military Academy, I was relentlessly drilled in the Army's distinction between the two: that leadership is the ability to command moral authority under pressure and to use that authority to pull or push group members towards the accomplishment of a task that, without the leader, they would not pursue. When facing oncoming fire this is, as you can imagine, a valuable skill in the pursuit of military objectives.

But away from such binary dichotomies, in the world of business, leadership can be as much a force for destruction as creation. Leaders will persuade staff to sacrifice their personal lives, to give up remote working, to deliver unpaid overtime, to ignore their holiday rights, to work through sickness... all in pursuit of goals that are, at best, nebulous and, at worst, in the interests of stakeholders that do not include the wellbeing of the workers.

It is in this world that HR ends up being the substitute manager who - as much in thrall to the leader as anyone else - takes on the tasks of management in support of the leader-who-will-not-manage. And that assumes that you have a leader who is actually able to lead and inspire. But if the culture of the company prioritises leadership without actually training for leadership (leadership is also a learnable skill, albeit nothing like as easy as management), you end up with people who are either neither leaders nor managers or, worst of all, who *think* they are leaders-who-will-not-manage but who are in fact sociopaths-who-will-not-manage.

The thing is management is always useful, but leadership is really only useful in a crisis. Staff are much more interested in knowing if the roster has been updated, if their holiday has been approved or whether they can swift shifts so they can go home early on Friday - which is all management. Leadership only matters when suddenly you're three staff down with a tight deadline and the server just crashed. But if you have a leader-who-will-not-manage, they are motivated to create or seek out crises where their skills are useful in order to conceal their failure to deliver the management for which they are actually paid.

Meanwhile (in this rambling monologue) we should address one of my favourite topics: the Peter Principle.

The promotion of good people to their point of incompetence is an axiom of management development. But it has been treated as a self-fulfilling prophecy when, in fact, it was really just a rallying call for better investment in management training. There is no reason to believe that good people will inevitably become incompetent if their employer continually invests in their development in skills that are - and I cannot emphasize this enough - *not difficult to acquire*.