A fundamental difference between
Management and Leadership is this:
- Making sure the work gets done = Management
- Increasing capacity of your team = Leadership
Team Capacity:
At day 1, your team has a certain capacity. It can deliver a certain amount of work, at a particular level
of quality, in a measured time frame.
As a manager it is your job to make sure that this work gets delivered on spec, on time and on budget.
But fast forward some amount of time, say 2 years…
At this time if you have been a great Manager, your team will have delivered consistently — but it will still be at the same capacity.
However, if you have been an effective Leader, your team will be able to deliver more work, of higher quality, faster.
Working ON your Business:
Leadership, and increased team capacity, comes from working ON your business vs. working IN your business.
To be an effective leader, of course you still need to make sure that all the work IN your business gets done, (preferably by delegating the management of this work to your managers).
But you then need to spend YOUR time working ON the business.
Working ON the business looks like:
- Getting better at the stuff you do: more, faster, higher quality, better results, bigger payoff
- Identifying and developing your top performers
- Building trust inside and outside your organization so everything can go faster
- Creating new process and systems to increase effectiveness and efficiency
- Finding strategies to take cost out doing the same things you did last year, to make room for new stuff even if you don’t get more money
- Creating learning agendas for your team around things like, customers, financial realities, decision processes, etc.
- Helping more of your team think like general managers.
For more ideas, join me for the next member call on Leading vs. Managing or sign up for the podcast.
Leading requires letting go
It is often difficult for leaders to let go of the content work. It feels like you will lose credibility if you are no longer operating in the details. But you are shooting yourself in the foot if you don’t let go.
See Addiction to Detail and Building Capacity for more ideas here.
As a Leader it is critical to think more like a General Manager than a subject matter expert, and free up time to work ON your business and increase the capacity of your team over time.
If you stay too stuck IN your business, in the content, you will miss the opportunity to Lead.
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