Leading or Managing

I came across a provocative article the other day that says that if you are weighed down with decisions, you aren’t leading, you are managing.  The thesis is that we pay managers to resolve disputes and make decisions in order to make our policies and strategies effective; the job of a leader is to set direction and train or recruit others to do make those micro-decisions.  As coach for many years, I see all-too-often, bosses who no doubt think they are leaders but are just too busy in the day-to-day stuff to think about the future.  Strategic thinking is usually reserved for the odd meeting I run to help them raise their eyes to the heights.

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and present CEO of Square, has the same approach. He believes it’s an organizational failure if he has to make a decision. He says his role is to see that decisions are being made, not to make them  “If I have to make a decision, we have an organizational failure. I can help provide context of what’s happening in the industry. But I definitely see the organization and the people in it as the ones to make the decisions, because they have the greatest context for what needs to be done.”

Resources:

1. Article

Tags: leadership ; managment

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2015 at 07:00 and is filed under Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.