Management and leadership are two complementary skills.
We often use the words interchangeably, as if they were the same job with different titles, but they aren’t. They draw on different mental muscles, point our attention in different directions, and produce different results. The most effective people I work with understand the difference and know when each one is needed.
Here’s a simple way to look at it:
management is about substance. Leadership is about state.
In management, our substance matters more than our state.
In leadership, our state matters more than our substance.
Let me explain.
The Power and Limits of Substance
Great managers get stuff done. They do it well, repeatedly, and with consistent quality. They can do that because their attention is focused on substance. They focus on the work itself.
They become subject matter experts. They use that expertise to build teams of other experts who reliably perform a specific function. They know the requirements, quality standards, goals, tasks, and the best way to execute them. When something breaks, they know how to fix it. When something needs to scale, they know how to build a scalable process.
This is a highly valuable skill, and I think we undervalue it. In our rush to celebrate “leadership,” we sometimes treat management as the less interesting sibling. But an organization will not survive without people who can reliably deliver. Management keeps the promises the organization makes.
Management does have limits. Marshall Goldsmith explored some of them in his wonderful book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. The habits and strengths that make us successful at one level can also hold us back at the next.
But while Marshall believed that behaviors keep us from growing into leadership, I believe it is something more subtle:
A manager’s attention gets stuck in the substance.
It gets anchored to what we do, the requirements we have, the standards we’re trying to meet, the goals we’re pursuing, and the tasks in front of us. All of that is important. But when substance is the only thing we pay attention to, we miss things.
- We stop noticing that the market is shifting.
- We stop hearing what people are asking of us.
- We stifle creativity and innovation because we overindex on execution.
Before we know it, we manage our way straight into irrelevance, while we get better and better at things that matter less and less.
Substance is what’s needed to do the work, but it rarely helps us determine if the work actually matters.
Leadership Starts With State
Leadership differs from management, and the simplest way to understand the difference is to look at what it requires of our attention.
Management anchors attention to the work.
Leadership anchors attention to the state we bring to the work.
Your state is the internal condition you are in. Are you grounded, curious, open, and present; or are you scattered, cocky, closed off, and withdrawn? This, of course, is just an example of one internal state. Our emotional steadiness, energy, attention, and a whole host of other things make up our state. The important thing to recognize is that our state is what people feel before they hear a word we say. This is important because our state is contagious.
For example, when a leader is anxious and reactive, it affects how other people feel and it influences the actions they take. People play it safe, stop sharing ideas, and wait to be told what to do when anxiety is high; so when a leader brings a negative energy or vibe into the room, people refrain from taking risks.
The opposite is also true! When a leader walks into a room feeling grounded and curious, people open up and feel more comfortable taking risks. They speak up, think freely, offer suggestions, and work more collaboratively when a leader’s state is spot on. The leader’s state becomes the team’s state.
State also shapes what we can see. When a leader is in a reactive state, they can only see the problem directly in front of them. They get pulled down into the weeds and caught up in the content. A leader in a calm, curious state sees something quite different. She rises up to 50,000 feet and looks out over the horizon. She notices the pattern behind the problem, the emotions in the room, and the opportunity nobody else sees. That is where creativity, innovation, and relevance come from.
This doesn’t mean substance doesn’t matter to leaders. It does. But in leadership, substance is rarely what separates the good from the great. Most senior leaders are surrounded by smart people with plenty of expertise. What’s in short supply is someone who can hold a steady, open, generous state when things get hard.
The Subtle Shift
Set some time aside several times a day to consider the state you are in. Just pause for thirty seconds to ask yourself two questions:
What state am I bringing into this room?
What state does this room need from me?
By pausing for just a moment, you can notice and adjust the state you are in and find yourself offering a much more effective form of leadership.
