Management was made the scapegoat when the Japanese became successful in the U.S. It is time to upgrade management to restore it to its rightful place.
Everyone wants to be a leader. No one wants to be a manager. Why is leadership glorified and management reviled? Someone said that you can manage things but only lead people. Leadership, as a result, is overburdened. It’s like saying get rid of marketing; sales can handle both functions. Where did we get this negative attitude toward management and how can we rid ourselves of it? Management’s fall from grace happened in the late 70’s when the U.S. was reeling from the shock of the Japanese commercial invasion. A scapegoat was needed and management was fingered for this role for being bureaucratic, controlling and risk averse. Management was said to stifle innovation, to preserve the status quo. The solution was to kill off management, to replace managers with leaders. Needing something to blame, we relished black and white simplicity even if it meant throwing out the baby with the bath water.
In earlier years, very little effort was made to distinguish management from leadership. Instead we debated the merits of various management/leadership styles as if the concepts were interchangeable. A common theme kept emerging – task versus people orientation. You could initiate structure or show consideration for people, be it theory X (people are not responsible) or theory Y (people are responsible). Later, you could be transformational or transactional. The former meant being inspiring while the latter merely exchanged rewards for work done. After the Japanese invasion, management got tarred with the bad guy side of these polar opposites while leadership was awarded the good guy role. Now we said that leaders are people orientated and inspirational while managers are task focused, controlling and mechanical. What were once mere styles became a way to differentiate leadership from management. It is time to correct this error and bring management back from the dead.
Why does this matter? Because replacing management with leadership suggests that leadership is a role or position. This makes leadership exclusively top down (you must be promoted to a leadership role to show leadership). But, if we define them both as functions – leadership to promote new directions and management to execute them, we spread the workload around more equally and explain how leadership can be shown upwards where the person showing leadership may not have the skills to manage a team. The truth is that management is just as critical as leadership. And managers can be as empowering and inspiring as they need to be to motivate people.
