I want to hijack this discussion to bring up a personal gripe I have about this all being called "leadership". It is a very PHB term.
With the exception of a few outlying examples, no job being discussed in this article is a leader. A leader has followers, and he can convince them to follow him through his sheer force of will and inspirational ability. Examples of leaders: Barack Obama, Mahatma Gandhi, Charles Manson, Jaime Escalante, Joseph Smith, Napoleon, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mao Zedong.
The people and job titles being discussed here are not leaders. They are managers. The difference is that people don't do what a manager says because he has inspired them to do so. People do what he says because they are paid to do so. That is, managers don't have followers. They have underlings.
Managers are of course needed. To work in groups effectively, a roughly fixed-arity hierarchy has many advantages, and in a hierarchy someone has to be a non-leaf node. The goal of a manager is to manage his underlings in such a way as to meet or optimize certain organizational goals. In general this is a very different set of skills than those found in the best leaders.
This isn't to say that certain leadership skills aren't helpful for management: obviously it's helpful if a manager can apply some powers of persuasion to his immediate underlings. But leadership skills are not necessary to management: there are plenty of reasonable managers with few or no apparent persuasive skills whatsoever (I'll be kind and not name names).
Persuasion is also not restricted to management: it's helpful in practically any job involving human relationships. This includes teachers, salespeople, hostage negotiators, lawyers, and magicians.
But few other career paths imagine themselves as "leaders". Teachers don't go to leadership seminars or buy ridiculous low-rigor books on leadership. This seems to be a cult special to the management community. Why do so many managers imagine themselves to be something they are not? I think it's for two reasons. First, they have power, and leaders have power, and so they have mistaken one for the other. Second, and more importantly, I think management is an awful and thankless life choice. Managers don't make anything or really contribute anything tangible to society. The Dilbert Principle is very valid here. And so managers try to imagine that their jobs ("leadership!") are more important than they really are, simply out of ego boosting.
I think that leadership is so valuable a skill, and so rare and powerful a force, that we should actively fight to prevent the management community from co-opting the term to describe the daily task of collating TPS reports.
You've got good points, but I think you're sometimes over-equalizing "performing tasks" with "following a leader." You're right about managers not doing the same work, i.e. tasks and activities. However, at a higher, more abstract level of accomplishing the organization's goal, e.g. reliably performing a service, leadership connects everyone from the customer relations up to the CEO, down to the layers of task-doers. This leadership is less about everyone, e.g., debugging at the same time, and more about everyone _paying_attention_ to the same activity, customer, project, mega-task at the same time.
Bad managers do foment underlings. They don't care when or how a task is done as long as it is checked off. Good managers, however, keep everyone focused. They know how to direct people so that their work is more than an isolated task... it leverages the momentum of everyone else's activity, creating a continuous end-to-end flow of information and materials in, through people, and back out to customers. The care and dedication for the customer are communicated in parallel all the way from the customer to the last person to touch the code or material.
I like to think about a combustion engine as a useful metaphor. It will work a little bit if timing is within a certain tolerance. It works best when the timing is correct. And it can be optimized for excellent performance. The imcompetence and ego-boosting you're describing are EXACTLY the hallmarks of poor leadership described in the FA. We definitely all need to learn to recognize and refuse to yield to, false confidence.
A good definition that has helped me distinguish between these two terms is that, "Leaders change the status quo. managers do not." there will be overlapping tasks and skills for these roles, but one definitely is not the other.
Managers are a necessary component of any sizable enough team, sure. The problem these days is that middle management doesn't really do it's job, and instead does the opposite by imposing their will and by getting in the way as they fight to maintain territory and climb the ladder themselves. It only takes a short while before middle management becomes this corrupt and worthless layer, especially if you hire them from the outside (already corrupted). Middle management also tends to suck due to lack of training and due to conversion from an individual contributor to manager being seen as a promotion and a path to executive leadership. The skills required of a manager and those required of someone in an individual contributor role are usually very different, and also the skills required of an exec are different from those required of a manager, so what's present are three separate paths that should be prepared for and climbed separately, but that often gets lumped together.
Better training would yield better middle management, so would a breaking out of this long held notion of territory and holding your employees down. I'm almost convinced that all managers care about are climbing the ladder, holding their employees back (to not lose them, to not have to deal with a threat of someone better, and to be able to take credit for everything the employee produces), buffering against lawsuits, and protecting their territory. That's it.
Sure there are some common threads among all career paths, but that is to be expected. The problem is that the individual contributor to middle manager role change isn't a promotion but a career change, and so is the change from middle manager to executive.
It's also a shame, because by the time most individual contributors are done climbing through the middle management ranks whatever energy, passion, naive ambition, and leadership ability they had is probably long gone (beaten out of them), and what's left is nothing more than the same old thing. This is especially bad if they also had grand visions of what the future could be, but by the time they are done climbing the ranks, they are just another bean counter looking for the next headcount trimming and for a way to meet this quarter's goals at the expense of the long term.
It's always easy to tell what happened to the good players that got beaten down while climbing the ranks, because the originally corrupted will play that good guy's misfortune as though it happened to them. They just love taking what they've done to other people, then playing it back as though it happened to them, not other people. Just listen to the excuses and "sob stories" of a corrupted management, and you'll get a good idea of what they'll do to you if you enter the race with any form of talent, potential, or ambition.
There should be a path for those that want to remain individual contributors, for those that want to be middle managers, and for those that want to end up in a leadership/executive role straight out of school. I understand the lack of incentives that a split among these roles would create (who would want to just be a middle manager with no path to senior leadership?), but that's something to be worked through. Someone can leave the individual contributor ladder and begin on any of the other ladders, but they should understand that this is a career/direction change and not a promotion. This animal needs to be turned on it's head.
And since there isn't one, anyone becoming a manager against their will, or as a stepping stone to executive leadership, needs to keep in mind and constantly remind themselves of what their true ambitions are, because if they don't, then after 8 or so years in middle management, they'll become absolutely worthless and probably corrupt. They also have to fight to hold on to their ability to craft a cohesive vision and making it happen, instead of mismanaging the ambition/vision of their superiors, because otherwise, they'll be ass out pulling the same dubious shit other worthless executives pull, and they'll be beating down star employees (to protect their own skin), rather than creating an environment in which they can get out of the way, and let those employees flourish.
With the exception of a few outlying examples, no job being discussed in this article is a leader. A leader has followers, and he can convince them to follow him through his sheer force of will and inspirational ability. Examples of leaders: Barack Obama, Mahatma Gandhi, Charles Manson, Jaime Escalante, Joseph Smith, Napoleon, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mao Zedong.
The people and job titles being discussed here are not leaders. They are managers. The difference is that people don't do what a manager says because he has inspired them to do so. People do what he says because they are paid to do so. That is, managers don't have followers. They have underlings.
Managers are of course needed. To work in groups effectively, a roughly fixed-arity hierarchy has many advantages, and in a hierarchy someone has to be a non-leaf node. The goal of a manager is to manage his underlings in such a way as to meet or optimize certain organizational goals. In general this is a very different set of skills than those found in the best leaders.
This isn't to say that certain leadership skills aren't helpful for management: obviously it's helpful if a manager can apply some powers of persuasion to his immediate underlings. But leadership skills are not necessary to management: there are plenty of reasonable managers with few or no apparent persuasive skills whatsoever (I'll be kind and not name names).
Persuasion is also not restricted to management: it's helpful in practically any job involving human relationships. This includes teachers, salespeople, hostage negotiators, lawyers, and magicians.
But few other career paths imagine themselves as "leaders". Teachers don't go to leadership seminars or buy ridiculous low-rigor books on leadership. This seems to be a cult special to the management community. Why do so many managers imagine themselves to be something they are not? I think it's for two reasons. First, they have power, and leaders have power, and so they have mistaken one for the other. Second, and more importantly, I think management is an awful and thankless life choice. Managers don't make anything or really contribute anything tangible to society. The Dilbert Principle is very valid here. And so managers try to imagine that their jobs ("leadership!") are more important than they really are, simply out of ego boosting.
I think that leadership is so valuable a skill, and so rare and powerful a force, that we should actively fight to prevent the management community from co-opting the term to describe the daily task of collating TPS reports.