Administrators vs. Managers vs. Leaders
Administrators control access to resources.
Managers allocate resources to tasks.
Leaders cause individuals to subconsciously frame those tasks in terms of their existential aspirations.
Below is a longer take. With apologies, it’s more biographical than I expected, probably because the way we understand concepts like this is deeply tied to our own experiences, and I find referencing those directly more effective than abstracting them away with theory.
Over the course of my career, including the MBA program at Harvard Business School, I encountered many explanations of the difference between managers and leaders. None resonated.
I’ve listened to boards discuss “leadership skills” and reference the notion of a “consummate manager.” I’ve heard people talk about someone who is “a great leader, but a bad manager.” 99% of the time these topics were discussed, the gist was clear but something about it was a bit fuzzy. Early on in my career I assumed it was my own ignorance (which, to be clear, was surely a factor). Later in my career, I knew there was an opportunity for greater clarity, but the answer seemed too distant to justify pulling on the thread for very long.
This bothered me because I sensed that the lack of clarity and common understanding was resulting in poor human capital decisions and inhibiting the development of great people.
It wasn’t until a lengthy phone call from a rented Suburban in South Florida (on the way to a friend’s bachelor party, I think) that some pieces unexpectedly came together. I was advising a friend of a friend on their business school application and chatting about what makes some leaders particularly effective when a continuum of administrations, managers, and leaders came into focus.
Administrators: The Guardians of the System
I first encountered the title of Administrator in an IT context, when I was 14 years old and learning to program, stuffing sexy books like this into my backpack to read during free time at school.
I had been building computers and setting up home networks and playing with web server software (IIS to host my school’s website, Apache to remotely access my home machine from the school’s computer lab) enough to be familiar with the notion of an Administrator account. It was core to controlling access to resources — programs, files, other machines, etc — and performing maintenance like software updates or config changes, since doing so required elevated permissions. I was in awe of the archetypal “Systems Administrator” persona referenced at the Microsoft user group events I asked my father to take me to once a month.
Then, when I was an undergraduate, the Administrator of one of the academic departments got wind of my Excel skills and hired me to train him in Excel macro development for a few hours a week. Who was this man and what did he do? He wasn’t a professor, and he didn’t have direct reports. He controlled access to resources — payroll, grant money, funds for department events, office space, etc. Sort of like a sys admin, he had a lot of power within a limited scope and mostly kept a low profile. (He was an awesome guy, by the way. and Harvard was fortunate to have him in that role.)
Managers: The Orchestrators of Action
In a pure sense, a manager uses available resources to accomplish some objective. Normally, this means some set of tasks is delegated to some set of people. It is very easy to do this poorly, and the difference between doing it poorly and doing it well is not strictly a function of how hard you work.
First, a manager develops a vision of a critical path — a sequence of tasks that will ultimately accomplish the objective. My hunch is that inexperienced managers require very high resolution critical paths — think of the canonical Gantt chart printed on many pieces of paper — while experienced managers can operate with a much lower resolution mental model. This is because they have an intuitive sense of what matters and can trust their spidey sense to catch things along the way. Regardless, and this is where management starts to stand out as a very non-deterministic discipline, there are near-infinite viable permutations of tasks and people, especially when you consider to what degree some tasks can be done in parallel. The most skillful managers have a very good seat of the pants sense for the capabilities, preferences, and constraints of their people and how they can best knock out the work required.
Once things are in motion, there is a spectrum of intervention — from total delegation for the entire duration of the task to co-execution. The right amount of intervention depends on lots of factors, but a few stand out:
- Balancing quality and speed: depending on how other tasks are progressing, it might be more important to just complete the task ahead of schedule than complete it perfectly in the original amount of time. Note the difference between hounding someone to finish vs sitting down with them to understand what’s left and deleting requirements explicitly to bring the finish line closer. This is where good managers can create value: five minutes of their time might save someone a couple days.
- Preempting blocks: great managers can tell someone is stuck before they even realize it. Intervening to provide clarity or talk things through is normally high value.
One of the most important principles of good management comes from the American designer and architect Charles Eames:
Never delegate understanding.
If you delegate understanding, your ability to dynamically optimize decreases profoundly. You can’t have a spidey sense of simmering problems, know how to prioritize requirements, or even question the objective itself if you don’t understand the work you are orchestrating. The folks who work for a manager have a great intuitive sense of this, and tend to have a lot more respect for someone who “gets it” and, if push came to shove, could do the work themselves to a high standard.
Common standards play an obvious but important role in success. Sometimes, these should be codified. More often than not, they are revealed implicitly by what you accept or produce yourself.
Leaders: The Catalysts of Human Potential
Leaders connect tasks/objectives to the idiosyncratic existential drives of each person.
This is often implicit, and normally about the total experience of being led by someone — what they say, what they do, how they interact with staff — versus any single magic phrase or performative act.
Ultimately, however, I believe this is the mechanism by which leadership works. Everything else that is normally discussed in this context — inspiring people, building trust– is downstream.
So, how do leaders do this?
The simplest (and rarest) method is to let the mission of the organization do the job. In this case, great leadership might consist of not getting in the way. Don’t sell after the close.
More commonly, the mission of the organization is somewhat compelling to people but alone it doesn’t inspire purpose or action. This is where leadership become paramount.
The best leaders cause someone to conceive of the work they need to do in existential terms: the conscious or subconscious needs a person has related to their self-image. Sometimes, especially with ambitious people, there is a desire to get closer to the self-image. Other times, especially with competent people who are pretty happy with themselves, there is a desire to maintain/reinforce the self image. Leaders address this in different ways:
- High level: “the kind of company we are,” “the way we do things here”. Being professional, assiduous, and diligent taps into someone’s desire to be those things. On the other hand, irreverence, a rebellious inclination, suspicion of authority, etc are powerful cultural hallmarks that would motivate a totally different kind of person.
- Lower level: the way of speaking and working, the approach to work (quality for its own sake, or efficiency in the name of efficiency) attract and motivate people who whether they know it or not are drawn to those ways of being.
- Importance: I once heard someone say that you should imagine everyone has a sign hanging around their neck that says “I want to feel important.” This is almost universally true, and making someone feel important (especially when it’s true) is almost always a great motivator.
There is a second-order benefit to this: when people feel they are acting in ways that are congruent with their self-image, they are much more likely to inspire themselves. Tsun-yan Hsieh, who is arguably the most compelling thinker on human nature in the context of business I have ever had the pleasure of meeting, introduced me to this concept and explores it beautifully in Learning to Inspire Yourself.
Even in rigorous, quantitative, elite contexts, our humanness is salient. When I interviewed Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone for Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck, I asked him if there were any books that he found particularly influential in his success. His answer surprised me: Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.
In most cases, people are rarely exclusively in one of these buckets. Administrators might manage office staff, managers who have strong leadership tendencies will only outperform those who don’t, and brilliant leaders who manage haphazardly are leaving a lot on the table.
The most important thing is to cultivate self-awareness about what the organization needs from you and to have a mental model of the mechanics by which you can achieve your best results.
