Leadership and Team Management
Managing and leading
- Learning outcome
- Tell management and leadership apart, and decide which one a situation needs.
- This sample
- Three lessons, one case and one workplace tool. About 35 minutes.
By the end of this unit you can tell when a situation needs managing and when it needs leading, and you stop mixing the two.
Think of the best manager you have worked for. What did that person do that others did not? Write two behaviours.
Map of the unit
- From doer to manager. What changes on the day you are promoted.
- Management and leadership. Two different kinds of work for two different problems.
- Reading the situation. Three questions that tell you which one is needed.
- Leadership is behaviour, not a title. Where trust comes from.
This sample contains Lessons 1 to 3 and the shared case. The full unit also has Lesson 4, the value of the unit, an example of failure, eight practice situations and a graded test.
From doer to manager
Most first promotions go to the best performer on the team: the fastest accountant, the most careful supervisor, the salesperson with the best numbers. The logic is easy to follow. Whoever has mastered the work should be able to oversee it. What happens in the first months surprises both sides.
The job has changed completely, and nobody said so. Before the promotion the question was "What did you get done?" After it, the question is "What did your team get done?" The skill that earned the promotion, doing the work better than anyone else, is no longer the skill the job needs.
Three things change on the day you are promoted
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Where results come from | Your hands and your skill | Your team's hands and their skills |
| Where your time goes | Doing the tasks | Explaining, following up and developing people |
| What you answer for | The quality of your own work | The result of the whole team, including other people's mistakes |
The third row is the hardest. A manager is asked about a mistake she did not make with her own hands, and she has only two ways to prevent it: do everything herself, or build a team that works well when she is not in the room. The first way works for two weeks and then wears her out. The second is the subject of this whole course.
The "I am faster" trap
When a new manager sees an employee struggling with a task, it is tempting to say: "Leave it, I will finish it in ten minutes." And it is true. He is faster. Look at what follows:
- The employee has not learned, so he will struggle with the same task tomorrow.
- The employee has learned that the manager will step in, so he starts to wait.
- The manager has added a task to his own day. A month later he is doing the work of three people.
Ten minutes saved today cost hours every week. This is why the move from doer to manager is described as one of the hardest in a working life: you have to stop doing the thing you are best at.
Salma is the best designer on her team and has been made supervisor of four designers. A month later she still redoes their designs herself before they go to the client. What has not changed in the way she works?
What is management? What is leadership?
If a manager no longer does the work with her own hands, what does she do all day? She deals with two kinds of problem, and each kind needs a different kind of work.
The first problem is complexity. Any team has many tasks, deadlines, a budget and people with uneven skills. If nobody puts these in order, tasks fall between people and the work runs late. Putting this complexity in order is called management.
The second problem is direction. Everything can be in order while the team does not know where it is heading, or knows and does not care whether it arrives. Conditions can also change, and yesterday's order becomes useless. Setting the destination and winning people over to it is called leadership.
What management does
- Planning: turning a goal into tasks, dates and a budget.
- Organising: deciding who does what, with what authority and resources.
- Following up and correcting: comparing what was done with what was planned, and dealing with a gap early.
The result of good management is order: work arrives on time, at the agreed quality, without surprises.
What leadership does
- Setting direction: where we want to arrive, and why it is worth the effort.
- Winning commitment: each person understands the direction, believes in it and sees their part in it.
- Support in hard times: the team holds together when work stumbles or conditions change.
The result of good leadership is commitment: people make the effort because they want to arrive, not only because they are told to.
This division goes back to the management scholar John Kotter, who summed it up this way: management copes with complexity, and leadership copes with change.
An example
A customer service department is told to answer complaints within 4 hours instead of 24.
- The management work: rearrange the shifts, decide who receives each type of complaint, and set up a daily report of response times.
- The leadership work: explain why the target changed (customers are leaving because replies are slow), listen to the team's worries about the pressure, and stand with them in the first weeks when mistakes are frequent.
With only the first part, the manager gets an excellent shift schedule and a resentful team looking for loopholes. With only the second, she gets an enthusiastic team that does not know who answers what.
When one of them is missing
| Situation | What you see in the team |
|---|---|
| Strong management, weak leadership | Orderly work without initiative. People do what is asked and no more, and resist any change. |
| Strong leadership, weak management | Great energy at the start, then missed deadlines and tasks done twice or forgotten. Energy turns into frustration. |
| Both weak | Disorder and complaint. The most capable people leave first. |
| Both strong | A team that knows where it is going and gets there on time. |
Management and leadership are two kinds of work done by one person. They are not two kinds of people. The same manager manages in the morning meeting and leads in a conversation after lunch.
A supervisor spends his day encouraging his team and talking about the department's ambitions, but nobody knows when any task is due. Which of the four situations is this?
How do you know what the situation needs?
You now know the difference between the two kinds of work. The practical question is this: when you stand in front of a problem in your team, which do you start with?
The three questions
Ask them in order, and stop at the first one that exposes the fault.
Question 1: Is the goal clear to the team?
Having announced it in a meeting is not enough. Test it. Ask three members of the team, separately, "What is the most important thing we are trying to achieve this month?" Three different answers mean the goal is not clear, however often you have repeated it.
If the answer is no, the need is leadership: make the direction clear and explain the reason for it.
Question 2: Is the method clear, and is the skill there?
The team may know the goal and still not know who is responsible for each step, or may lack the skill or the tools. Test it by asking "Who does what, and by when?" If there is no written or agreed answer, the fault is in the organisation.
If the answer is no, the need is management: set the roles, train, and provide the tools.
Question 3: Is the situation new, or is there pressure and uncertainty?
In ordinary times it is enough for the system to run. In a major change or a crisis people become anxious and look for someone to steady them and name the next step. A system cannot answer anxiety.
If the answer is yes, add more leadership: be present in person, say what you know and what you do not, and name the next step.
A working rule: if the team is busy but nobody knows why, you have a leadership problem. If everyone knows why but the work is stuck, you have a management problem.
The questions applied twice
First situation. A sales team of five works long hours. One chases large customers, another concentrates on renewing old contracts, a third sells the cheapest product because it is easiest. Total sales do not rise.
- Question 1: is the goal clear? No. Each salesperson has chosen a goal of their own.
- We stop here. The problem is leadership, and a new tracking sheet will not solve it.
- The step: the manager sets one priority for the quarter and explains why.
Second situation. Everyone in a purchasing department knows that the goal is to shorten the time it takes to supply materials. Orders are still a week late, because each one passes through three people and nobody knows who gives the final approval.
- Question 1: is the goal clear? Yes.
- Question 2: is the method clear? No. The approval path is not defined.
- The problem is management. A motivating speech will not save a single day.
- The step: the manager names the approver and sets a time limit for each stage.
A hospital moves to a new electronic system for patient files. Training is complete and every nurse knows the steps, but the ward is tense, mistakes are rising and some staff are asking to go back to paper. What does the situation need?
Khalid's first month
The same company and the same people appear in every unit of this course. Here we apply the three questions to them, step by step.
The situation
Khalid was the best supervisor at Almasar Logistics, so he was promoted to operations manager over 12 employees. In his first month he checked every shipment himself, corrected his team's work with his own hands and stayed two hours after closing every day.
What Mr. Sultan noticed after six weeks
- Shipments leave on time.
- Employees take no initiative. They wait for Khalid on every decision, even small ones.
- Noura and Fahd disagree every week about priorities. She wants fast replies to the customer, he wants accurate loading, and neither knows which matters more to the company this quarter.
- Khalid is exhausted and has started to make mistakes himself.
The diagnosis with the three questions
- Is the goal clear to the team? No. The repeated disagreement between Noura and Fahd shows that the priority was never set.
- Is the method clear, and is the skill there? The method exists and so does the skill, but every decision sits with Khalid.
- Is the situation new? Yes. A new manager, and a team that does not yet know what to expect from him.
The finding: management is working because Khalid fills every gap with his own effort, which is the "I am faster" trap from Lesson 1. Leadership is absent: no stated direction, and no room for the team to act.
What Khalid did, and why
- He set the direction. He gathered the team for 20 minutes and announced the goal for the quarter: to cut delivery errors from 6 in every 100 shipments to 3. He explained the reason: two large customers had threatened not to renew their contracts because of the errors. That settled the disagreement between Noura and Fahd. Accuracy comes first this quarter.
- He shared out the decisions. Daily decisions in the warehouse belong to Fahd and contact with the customer belongs to Noura. They come back to him only above a limit they agreed together.
- He changed how he follows up. He stopped checking every shipment and kept two meetings a week in which he reviews the numbers with the team.
The hard part
In the second week a shipment went out with a wrong address that Khalid would have caught if he had checked it. He was tempted to go back to checking everything. Instead he sat down with Fahd, asked what had happened, and agreed on a verification step that Fahd himself added. When Mr. Sultan asked about the error, Khalid said: "A fault in our procedure, and we have fixed it." He did not name the employee.
A month later
- The daily questions brought to Khalid fell by more than half.
- Delivery errors fell to 4 in every 100 shipments. The goal is 3.
- Khalid leaves on time most days.
Not everything is solved. Fahd still reacts sharply when asked about a mistake, and Ahmed ignores the new procedure. We return to them in later units.
The situation card
Choose a real problem in your team this month and fill in the card. The evidence column matters most: an answer without evidence is an impression, and impressions are what lead managers to treat the wrong problem.
Answer the three questions to see what the card suggests.
What you write stays on this device. On the learning platform it is saved to your account and added to your portfolio.