Why Leadership Is Part Of 21st Century Management

In response to my recent articles on 21st century management, some readers have asked whether I should be really talking about 21st century leadership, not 21st century management.

The idea that leadership is separate from management is in fact a 20th century management idea. In 21st century management, everyone is expected and empowered to be a leader and a value creator. And executives are not spending their time in luxurious corner offices, issuing edicts to their distant underlings, far below them in the vertical hierarchy. The organization is a horizontal network, not a steep multi-layered hierarchy. In 21st century management, executives are expected to pitch in as needed to solve practical problems.

Leaders And Managers: Are They Different Kinds Of People?

The notion that leadership is somehow different and separate from management was launched in HBR in 1977 by psychoanalyst Abraham Zaleznik with his idea that “leaders and managers are different kind of people”.

The idea stuck and helped create a vast training industry in leadership that continues. Harvard Business Review took the unprecedented step of republishing the article twice—in 1992 and 2004, as if to signify loyal support for the viewpoint, Business school professors like Jeffrey Pfeffer have declared this thinking to be “Leadership BS,” that often makes things worse.

Zaleznik argued that leaders are heroic innovators with vision and character. They have “a bigger vision,” with “much in common with artists,” and “in working environment that is often chaotic.”

The Denigration Of Managers

By contrast, managers are ridiculed as unimaginative “controllers”, who “focus attention on process, not on substance,” who communicate to subordinates indirectly, using signals, not messages,” and “play for time” to reduce risk.

The fact that Zaleznik provided no more than anecdotal evidence for these breathtaking generalizations was no obstacle to their enthusiastic and widespread acceptance. Apparently Zaleznik’s psychoanalytic insights were sufficient “management science” in place of data.

Obviously, Zaleznik detested the world of management, making the even more absurd claim in his 1989 book, The Management Mystique, that management requires managers to “dedicate themselves to indirect forms of communication and ignore ideas, people, emotion and direct talk.”

Zaleznik’s World of Upstairs-Downstairs

Despite his low regard for management, Zaleznik nevertheless saw that managers were needed to get things done. And if he couldn’t change these despicable people, he could at least put “real leaders” on top of them and tell them what to do.

In Zaleznik’s world, real leaders set direction: getting there was up to the munchkin-like managers. As a result, “leadership” became disconnected from getting things done in the world. Leadership was a set of character attributes, not a way of getting results.

“Management” was something more mundane, tactical, empty of ethics, and beneath the attention of serious people. It was an upstairs-downstairs concept of an organization, not too different from the fictional Edwardian estates of Downton Abbey or Manderley,

How Zaleznik’s Thinking Hurt Both Leadership and Management

In the result, Zaleznik’s two “classes of people” argument damaged both leadership and management. Every executive now wanted to be “a leader.” Aimless leadership training exploded. Executives spent time trying “discover the leader deep within themselves.” Executive compensation increased exponentially, independent of performance.

Meanwhile, no executive wanted to be called “a manager.” Managers came to be seen as incapable of real leadership. Under managers, command-and-control practices intensified, as managers struggled to find their role, often prompting complaints about “the frozen middle.”

Managers spent more and more time reporting on work than in doing work. The epitome of Zaleznik’s manager was Harold Geneen, the CEO of ITT (1959-1977) with some 375,000 employees, who defined the goal of management as: “to make individuals as predictable and controllable as the capital assets for which they are responsible.” For the firm to operate like a machine, micro-management and tight command-and-control were seen as essential.

Rescuing Both Leadership And Management

It is surely time to recognize that Zaleznik’s idea that leaders and managers are fixed character types has no basis in fact. Rather than looking at the type of person involved, executives practicing in 21st century firms use the entire array of management and leaderships tools as and when needed. (Figure 1) Leadership is seen as a facet of the discipline of management, not vice versa.

Executives and staff need to use the full array of management and leadership tools, depending on the context and the need.

And read also:

Why Business Agility Requires A Shift From A Hierarchy To A Network

The Management Paradigm Driving The World’s Fastest Growing Firms