10Develop a Leader Mindset
Different?” The piece caused an uproar in business schools. It argued that
the theoreticians of scientifi c management, with their organizational dia-
grams and time-and-motion studies, were missing half the picture—the
half fi lled with inspiration, vision, and messy human nature. This, Zalez-
nik argued, was truly what leadership was about.
As HBS professor John Kotter later argued, management is about re-
sponding to complexity. To get a job done, managers must focus on con-
trol and predictability, and they must organize processes that will produce
orderly outcomes. Planning, budgeting, and staffi ng are all management
activities. When you draw up task assignments, for example, or discuss
optimizing a production line, you’re wearing the manager hat.
Leadership, by contrast, explains Kotter, is about producing and re-
sponding to change. Leaders see opportunities in the instabilities that
their managerial alter egos want to tame, and they emphasize ideas over
process. Setting direction, aligning people, and providing motivation are
all leadership activities. When you coach a star employee or decide to halt
your production optimization process because it’s just not working, that’s
leadership.
Kotter argues that management and leadership are complementary
modes of being and need not be in confl ict. The most successful managers
in today’s challenging business environment leverage both management
and leadership competencies selectively to benefi t the organization. In this
book, we’ll use the words somewhat interchangeably, preferring “man-
ager” for technical and administrative topics and “leader” for issues that
touch on vision, strategy, and motivation.
While your company determines when and how you transition to man-
agement, opportunities for leadership can present themselves at any time
in your career. That’s because leadership doesn’t always require formal au-
thority, but rather an array of intellectual and interpersonal skills.
Demystifying leadership
Although management and leadership are deeply intertwined in practice,
we have long put the idea of leadership on a higher plane. We often view