A lot has been written on the subject of management vs leadership when it comes to guiding teams. I’ve heard it argued that great executives lead whereas poor executives manage. I think this fails to recognize that management and leadership are equally important and that success is not likely unless both are done well.
Peter Drucker has said that “management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” The idea of managing people should not always imply micromanagement. Like nearly every other executive skill there are both strategic and tactical aspects of people management, and different levels of involvement ranging from deeply immersing yourself in a team member’s day-to-day to only framing success conditions for a project or role.
When I think of what management means as opposed to leadership, I think of setting constraints. There is a perception that setting constraints on mature, professional people is a waste of their abilities or even insulting, but I believe quite the opposite: failing to set constraints, or to put it another way, expectations, reduces the likelihood that people will find their way to success and makes it harder for them to succeed.
People know how to do their jobs better than you do (hopefully) but they don’t necessarily know what the broader group, or the rest of the organization, or the CEO, or the board, or your users, or the market really needs from them. It’s up to you to manage these expectations by setting very clear success criteria whenever possible, and to manage their paths to meeting those expectations by course correcting early and often if they begin to drift off course, because though everyone on the team should have the ability to succeed on their own, almost no one will have the perspective to know how they’re doing at all times.