Leaders and Managers are neither choices nor grades

Over the past few decades, I have been seeing a rising crescendo in the volume of books on leadership.  Books on how to be leaders; books on why you need to be a leader; books on leaders who care for the people they lead; books explaining the leadership styles of people you don’t normally categorise as leaders, like Jesus; books on industries, paradigms and, indeed, the world being changed by leaders.

I don’t have much truck with this bandwagon (is this a pun?).  After all, it does add to the wealth of choices of self-improvement paths, even if it is a little too crowded at the moment.  Don’t some sections of the bookstore feel a bit stuffy nowadays, bibliographically speaking?  And if they inspire or help someone on the journey towards their aspirations, what harm is there?  Even if by definition, most of them will fail to reach the exalted goals set out in such books, because our society and the organisational structures within it are not designed to be saturated with leaders.

However, there is one category of leadership books that I find unusually toxic for individuals, organisations, and society as a whole: those that ask whether you are a leader or a manager.  There is a dualism here, that the leader is opposed to the manager and that we will end up as one or the other.  We cannot be both.

The underlying assumption is that everyone should aspire to be a leader and buying the book that espouses this will ensure the prospective leader will never be mistaken as a mere manager. This relegates the manager to being an also-ran leader, or worse, a failed leader, one who didn’t make the grade.  Of course, if you were to define a leader as one who has all the good attributes to be at the top of the organisational pyramid, while the manager is one who lacks them all, then I guess the assessment will always hold true. 

Definitions

Would this false opposition dissolve away if I were to tweak the definitions to those more generally accepted?  At least I believe them to be:

Leader: Someone who articulates a vision and inspires people to commit to that vision.  Nothing more, nothing less.  I don’t think I will get many objections to this definition, right?

Manager: Someone who manages people and resources to achieve a set task or objective.  Pretty much a textbook definition.  In other words, the person who gets things done.

If we were to use these definitions, then we can see that they are both roles with their own specific objectives and responsibilities. As these objectives are required in any organisation and are often complementary, they are not in conflict with each other.  And as there are no allusions to competence, they are also not different ends of a competence spectrum. 

Importantly, as they have a role different from that of the leader, managers are trained in a skill set different from leaders.  What makes a successful manager is markedly different from what makes a successful leader.  Managers are not people who didn’t make it to be a leader and are tolerated or relegated to manage instead.  Management is a skill in its own right and is fundamentally necessary to the proper functioning of an organisation in a different way than leaders are necessary to the same organisation.  While certain traits of a leader should also be taught to prospective managers in much the same way that training for different professional disciplines sometimes, but never wholly overlap, the curriculum to train managers and leaders has to remain separate and distinct even if there are skills in common.

Leaders and managers

Because they are roles, the leader and the manager roles can be undertaken by the same person but often they are not.  The skills and the temperament to carry both roles well are fundamentally different.  The leader needs to be creative with their solution to a problem, read their audience well in its openness to accept the proposed solution, and communication skills in plenty to persuade and enthuse that audience.  The manager, on the other hand, must have the strategic and environmental awareness to understand the vision, a mechanical mind to see the path from the current state of the organisation to one which can achieve the vision and the implementation skills to manage the resources along that path.  Temperamentally, the leader tends to be intuitive and reads people well as a group, whereas the manager tends to be more data-rational and reads people well as individuals.

In addition, it is also very difficult for the human brain to accommodate both the big picture that the leader focuses on and also simultaneously delve into the minutiae of operational details that the manager works with.  Yes, there are probably individuals who can do it but they will be very rare.  Not something I would be relying on to get something done.  And most of such individuals will not usually be able to operate at both levels simultaneously, anyway. 

Leaders need good managers every bit as much as we need good leaders.  Without good managers, a leader has plenty of promises but no delivery.  More so when we consider the fact that many good leaders are extremely bad managers. Without the skills or the patience to deal with operational-level managers, leaders are often extremely reliant on a good management team to turn their vision into reality.

We all now know that Elon Musk being his own management team in X and DOGE has a very different level of effectiveness compared to Elon Musk surrounded by very competent management teams in Tesla and SpaceX.  Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, who both inspired millions to fight and die for their respective visions on opposite sides of the wartime coin, were both notoriously ineffectual at managing.  More about both of them later.

These examples are not aberrations; they illustrate a more general point. Leadership and management are rarely cleanly separated in real organisations, nor should a leader try to be their own manager. Most people operate with a particular blend of the two, shaped by personality, capability, and the demands of their role. Understanding this mix is far more useful than asking whether someone is a leader or a manager.

The leadership and management mix

Also, it is important to understand that it is not a binary assessment that people are either leaders or managers.  Often, they are both, though in a different mix, dependent on personality and requirement.  The mix may differ by the level of management that they are at.  Even the most visionary leader must have a modicum of management skill to manage the level of senior managers below them.  They do not need to manage the level below that and most do not.  Indeed, some are able to reach out to all those levels beyond the immediate level only in their leadership language, and not in managerial terms.

But as long as the top level of management is competent enough to understand the vision and to transition the existing corporate infrastructure to one that can realise the vision, the leader need not manage any further.  Some leaders are able to and that will be a bonus.  But some visionary leaders are known to be notoriously difficult to work with.  Think Steve Jobs and Margaret Thatcher.  Many creative or visionary people are neurodivergent and neurodivergent people often create challenging environments around them. 

In such cases, the senior management level who have direct contact with the leader and who have a certain tolerance and patience for the eccentricities exhibited, have an additional role to shield the rest of the organisation from the excesses of the leader.  This shielding role is difficult, sometimes personally painful and always appreciated by those with direct knowledge of it.  Loss of this shield could mean the leader no longer has the managerial tools to guide the organisation, and the leader may no longer be able to fit into the organisation, no matter how successful they have been.  That is how Thatcher departed as the British prime minister in 1990, despite never having lost an election.

The most operational of managers, on the other hand, may not need much leadership skills but they will definitely benefit from having a strategic awareness to understand the vision that drives what they do in the organisation.  Ideally, the leader’s vision should be able to penetrate to and inspire every person involved in the enterprise.  One writer of the Apollo program tells of a mechanic one night, thinking he was alone and not realising he was being observed, raised his fist up to the full moon: there were many people on the shop floor like him in the space industry of the 60s, who believed in a vision articulated by a dead president whom they never met but were driven by that dead president to realise it to reality.

The mix may also differ with the demands of the role, which is often not defined by the job description but rather the team they are a part of. George C Marshall and Dwight D Eisenhower were four-star generals at the top of the US military hierarchy during the 1944 Normandy invasion.  Marshall had the more strategic role of the two, translating President Roosevelt’s vision into military campaigns, including the intricate support and logistics required to win them.  Eisenhower led the Allied forces in Western Europe and had to manage many a bruised warrior ego to ensure Marshall’s vision could work in a fractious multinational environment.  That doesn’t make Eisenhower short on strategic vision. Indeed, he later moved on to become America’s second Cold War president.  It is just that they divided the tasks to tackle the two ends of a strategic problem, fighting a war to build a vision of a particular post-war world order as well as the diplomatic and people management at a very intricate level.  Marshall focused on the vision and identified its critical success factors, while Eisenhower translated that vision into strategy and tactics.

Bad leaders vs bad managers

Interestingly, you rarely come across bad leaders because they never last long.  Note that what I mean by bad leaders are those who fail to inspire a following to their vision, not those who fail to lead their followers to the vision.  Without judging the morality of their vision, leaders like Hitler and Mao were doubtlessly inspiring leaders but they failed for reasons I will explore later.  So, it is important to remember here that leaders who are charisma successful can still be outcome unsuccessful because leadership is but one element of success.

In the highly combative and competitive marketplace for people’s belief systems that leaders are often fighting over, someone without the ability to inspire will quickly fall to the wayside, having no followers, no matter how elegant the vision.  The metrics of being a leader are really that simple.  Leaders are only as good as the number of people they can inspire to commit to their vision.  Organisations always need good leaders and there is no place in them for bad leaders. 

If there are no good leaders, though, many organisations choose to wait it out until they find one.  In the meantime, they can run without a leader.  It is like a ship that will continue on its course even if there is no one at the tiller to change course.  Did you know that Belgium once ran for over 500 days without a government while the political parties haggled over a coalition?  They survived pretty well without a prime minister; just that they had no new policies, that’s all.

Bad managers, on the other hand, exist.  Often, well beyond their utility.  Organisations always need managers as they cannot function for a day without managers. Returning to the analogy of the ship, if leaders are the tiller to change course, managers are the engine.  The ship can still move without the tiller, even if not on an optimal course, but it cannot move without the engine.  Managers make the decisions that make a company functional, from determining how to measure the success of their strategy to when the handyman needs a new consignment of lightbulbs.

Organisations may seek to replace underperforming managers but because performance criteria are often notoriously difficult to apply consistently, and also because most managers are a mix of underperformance and overperformance in different areas, bad managers are often left in place.  Good organisations may adjust to mitigate poor management in one part of the process but sometimes bad management easily becomes evident to the outside world.

Governance

There is a third element to facilitate the best out of the leader and the manager, and that is the governance framework.  I define governance as the philosophy and practice by which the vision of the leader is translated into actual reality on the ground and reflected back in reports provided to the leader and the management team.  The governance framework translates these governance requirements into the actual organisational structures, processes, reports, and all the other paraphernalia, as interpreted through the culture of the organisation, to ensure that the vision happens as intended. 

Both Churchill and Hitler may be personally short on the management front but they are definitely not short on management competence in their respective teams.  Both armies had very competent generals.  Indeed, many would argue that the leadership of the German Army, which lost the war, was superior to the leadership of the British Army.  Most World War aficionados would be able to name more German generals than British ones. What differentiated Churchill from Hitler as far as leadership was concerned, was not having more leadership and management competence on his side but rather the governance framework he operated within.

Churchill worked within a democratic framework, which imposed a system of checks and balances on his decisions as a leader and the framework was able to mitigate the worst of his strategic planning shortcomings, of which he had plenty.  Hitler, on the other hand, had no such constraints on his strategic planning, which was as bad if not worse than Churchill’s, and thus saw his strategic errors come to fruition – as rotten ones. 

The lesson here is that, as humans, we are full of flaws and any person seeking to fulfil their potential, whether leader or not, must recognise the limitations of their flaws.  More so for the leader, whose error carries much more impact than those of regular Joes like you and me.  It would be ideal if the leader could recognise these limitations through internal self-reflection.  Unfortunately, our education system and the culture of the society itself do not teach us to do that. Self-reflection is not always a reliable or consistent tool to weed out shortcomings.

So, the framework to manage the leader’s limitations can sometimes only be imposed from elsewhere.  It is easy for Churchill because the democratic framework is the default of the political system.  It is a lot harder for autocratic systems, which build these frameworks from a vacuum, as well as highly hierarchical or feudalistic societies. Even in the modern world, there are cultures where it is socially unacceptable to disagree with a person who is senior to oneself, either in age or in position. The failure to ringfence the negative effects of such a leader’s shortcomings, whether due to fears of legal or extra-legal consequences or due to social norms, can be existential.

Leadership governance in a corporate setting

Interestingly, it is equally difficult in a corporate setting, including corporates in democratic countries. Our commercial corporate management framework is monarchical, because only one person and one person alone is accountable for every decision in the company. Even if a janitor’s negligence caused someone to slip and suffer an injury, nobody on the Board will question the janitor, as protocol dictates that only the Chief Executive Officer alone is deemed ultimately answerable for any shortcoming anywhere in the company.

The CEO answers to the Board, and the Board answers to the shareholders and the market, the latter being the final arbiter over which corporation succeeds.  If the CEO is not able to self-reflect on their own limitations, every strategic decision then becomes a gamble.  If the gamble pays off, it can pay off handsomely, much like Hitler’s initial decisions; but if the gamble fails, it can fail miserably, much like Hitler’s later decisions.

If the Board determines that the risk is not one they are willing to accept, it then becomes the Board’s responsibility to build a governance framework to filter out the CEO’s excesses or eccentricities.  I am not saying there needs to be a system of reviewing and second-guessing the CEO’s strategic decisions, but rather one based on a careful assignment of decision-responsibilities along the lines of vision and management appropriate to the person’s temperament and skills, not according to conventional CEO job descriptions.  The visionary CEO’s role then focuses on the vision itself: adapting it to continuing relevance to the changing environment, charismatically communicating it throughout the organisation and monitoring to ensure that the corporate infrastructure is being built accordingly to the needs of the vision.

While I accept that CEO hubris is a necessary part of CEO success, the hubris of a CEO unable to self-reflect often leads to destruction.  The mind of the non-self-reflecting leader often replays the moment of their greatest triumph and eventually sees the world frozen at that moment.  That is why at the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, Hitler retraced his May 1940 invasion route of France, the moment of his greatest glory.  Putin expected the world to react to his 2022 invasion of Ukraine the same way it did when he took over Crimea in 2014 without firing a shot.  The world, however, is not static and visions not updated to the dynamics of a changing world quickly become irrelevant and no longer fit for purpose.

Leadership without the leader

Does the leader need to be there to guide the organisation towards the vision?  Well, not necessarily, though there will be limits.  Much like the ship will continue on its course without a hand on the tiller as long as the engine runs, the organisation will continue to operate along the lines of the set vision, even in the absence of the leader, as long as the management team competently manages it.  However, just as a ship could run aground on a sandbank if no one is there to change course, an organisation will similarly run aground if the vision is no longer relevant to the changing environment.

Leadership influence, however, does not always depend on formal authority or active participation in day-to-day management. In some cases, the vision continues to shape decisions long after the leader has stepped aside or even after they are gone entirely. Apple, for instance, is still running on the vision charted by Steve Jobs, even after he has long departed. The question is whether the external environment has changed sufficiently that the vision Jobs left behind is no longer relevant.  Whether Jobs would have articulated the vision differently today, in a way nobody at Apple today could.  It does not mean the company is no longer a successful company; it just means it runs on a different vision, that’s all.  Maybe one that exploits its advantage of incumbency to maintain its competitive position rather than one which innovatively challenges the position of the then incumbent.  Maybe the current Apple leadership has successfully transitioned to the strategic position of the incumbent, even if everyone expects it to operate the Jobs vision, which may be impossible without Jobs.

One way around it is for the wise leader to step down from operational management but still supervise from a higher level.  Many founder CEOs often pass on management tasks to a professional CEO while holding on to the vision role as Chairman.  But there are some who relinquished all positions while still able to hold a watching brief.  Not many people know that at the time of the Tiananmen incident in 1989, Deng Xiaoping’s only official position in China was as the president of the China Bridge Federation.  He may have retired but still retained enough of a network to know what was going on and to intervene decisively in a way no one else could, to deal with the threat to the Chinese Communist Party.

Leaders continuing to shape the organisation from the grave is not unique to Apple.  I have sat in on enough management meetings to hear risky proposals being justified on the grounds that ‘if Steve Jobs could do it, so can we.’ Candidates aiming to lead the British Conservative Party have to seek the imprimatur of the ghost of Margaret Thatcher, despite her legacy with a segment of the broader British electorate being controversial to the point of being toxic.

Conclusion

So here is the core argument. Leadership and management are not opposing ends of a spectrum, nor are they ranks in a hierarchy of worth. They are distinct roles, requiring different skills, temperaments, and disciplines, and they are both indispensable to any complex organisation. Leadership without management produces vision without delivery; management without leadership produces motion without destination.

What determines whether the two work together productively is governance: the framework that allocates decision rights, constrains excess, and mobilises the appropriate resources for the organisation to translate vision into operational reality. Where governance is weak, organisations become hostage to the flaws of individuals. Where it is strong, imperfect leaders and managers will collectively outperform their limitations.

Leaders, therefore, should respect managers not as failed leaders but as professionals whose competence makes leadership possible. Managers, in turn, must learn how to hold up a mirror to their leader in a way they can accept. When leadership, management, and governance are aligned in the right proportions, organisations do not merely function; they achieve.