You Keep Saying Leader but You Probably Mean Manager
They are different and the difference matters
If you scour the About Us sections of many business websites you’ll probably see a link for “Leadership.” Click through and you’ll no doubt explore their roster of C-suite employees. Impressive!
This makes some assumptions, doesn’t it? Off the bat, it assumes staff with high-hierarchy titles are leaders. Chief Whatever Officers are certainly up on the management scale. They oversee people and/or departments, so this makes sense. But what does it say about the quality of their management? Absent such a qualifier, how can we say with any certainty they are leaders?
Not all managers are leaders. Some are. At the same time, not all leaders manage. I have this debate with people all the time. The most common response is, “But Evan, who cares? What does it matter what we call these people?”
I argue it matters a lot.
We can’t easily define leadership. But like pornography, we know it when we see it — or when we don’t, for that matter. I’ve been led by as many executive assistants (EAs) as I have by the executives they serve. I bet many of you have that experience, and do you know why? Because oftentimes EAs care. No, not all of them. But so many I’ve worked with approach situations…
