Reviewing John Kotter’s book Accelerate (XLR8) in preparation for a conversation about a Guiding Coalition. I found this table – about as short as you can get in describing the difference between management and leadership.
| Management | Leadership |
| – Planning – Budgeting – Organizing – Staffing – Measuring – Problem solving – Doing what we know how to do, exceptionally well – Constantly producing reliable, dependable results | – Establishing direction – Aligning people – Motivating people – Inspiring people – Mobilizing people, to achieve astonishing results [including innovation] – Propelling us into the future |
As it transpires, this table above was useful. During our conversation we also found a few additional nuggets.
- Managers often want to be the final authority, to make the decision. They must resist, as encouraged by the principles of trust, empowerment, self-organization … at best, if the team will allow it, they can be part of the team who makes the decision. No more.
- Product Owners make decisions like managers often want to make. If that kind of decision is needed, go get the Product Owner.
- All this desire to be managed is amplified by the next fire drill. Two things about fire drills:
- Fire drills encourage management-style thinking in people not accustomed yet to being leader. Specifically they may try to abandon process to get it done quicker. As my mentor Murray Cantor would say, do not abandon process. If it’s not going fast enough, improve/modify it for speed, but do not abandon it.
- Managers get tired of the phrase “everything is an experiment”, especially during the next fire drill. And yet experimentation is what is needed to become more Agile. The thing is, sure, it is an experiment, but it often comes without the option to fall back, to fail backward. Therefore, plan to fail forward. Experiment continuously, but plan to fail forward. No failing backward, only forward.