Organisational Coaching – Great Organisations and Great Managers

... for the last 30 years, it has been ideas about leadership, not management, that have come to dominate our conversations and our bookshelves. We believe it is time to redress the balance. Leadership is about the traits and behaviors that make us worth following. Management is about how we get work done through others.¹

As you read Organisational Coaching, you may notice that I always refer to "managers" and "management". This often causes grief as someone comes back with the inevitable, "we need leaders and not managers".

When did management become such as bad thing?

Management is defined as "getting things done through people" (from Old French ménagement "the directing", from Latin manu agere "to lead by the hand"). Management is a well defined word. A manager delivers results through people. Companies need managers to operate and succeed.

What is a leader?

• The leader of the Tour De France - gets to wear the yellow jersey.

  The leader is the one out the front.

• Comic book visitors from mars allows always ask to "take me to your leader".

  The one who can represent the people.

• Richard Feyman was a leader in the field of quantum physics.

  The leader is the predominate expert.

• Dell and Amazon were considered leaders in their adoption of web technology.

  The leader was the early adopter.

• In many charity organisations the leader is often the one who does all the work.

  The leader is the worker.


• It is common now for organizations to want to develop leadership in all their staff.

  Leadership is commitment and initiative.

  In this context it is also ironically the ability to follow.

• A leader is also the short strip of blank film at the beginning and end of a film which is used to connect it to the spool or to thread the film onto the project.

  The leader is overhead.

So what is a leader?

Unfortunately in common usage the "leader" has become whatever the person using the word wants it to be. This is the problem with leadership, it's too fluffy, ill-defined. It's hard to hold someone accountable for poor "leadership". We can hold someone accountable for poor management.

Among the many skills and attributes of excellent managers are those which are often ascribed to leadership; vision, decisiveness, act with purpose and intent, single minded and focussed, have a view of the future, engage the support of their people, integrity, ability to positively influence and so on. Good managers have these characteristics and poor managers do not.

Managers achieve and deliver results and they are accountable for those results. Aspire to be an excellent manager and you will develop leadership along the way.