Connell Fanning, Assumpta O’Kane, and Marija Laugalyte
Since publishing The Leadership Mind in 2022, we have been privileged to have readers who raise interesting and useful questions that keep our thinking moving forward.
One of these questions is, where does ‘management’ end and ‘leadership’ begin? In other words, what is expected differently of management and leadership? A related question is, why is the shift from management to leadership difficult?’
A first answer
Clarity about the difference in nature, role, and purpose between management and leadership is necessary for getting both right, and that requires, in the first instance, paying attention to conceptual definitions. The reason for this is simple: these are concepts – tools – for thinking with, so we need to know what we are talking about. Definitions matter, as they shape our instruments of thought.
Management is an organisational function that coordinates and aligns resources with strategy: planning and setting objectives, organising activities and structures, integrating, motivating, and communicating, measuring and establishing targets, and developing people.
The argument of The Leadership Mind established that leadership is best conceptualised as “insight into people, their situation, and their prospects”, with the accompanying definitions of ‘people’ as encompassing the self and others – that is, self-awareness and awareness of others; the ‘situation’ as encompassing the full complicated reality; and the ‘prospects’ as encompassing the complex of diverse expectations among the plurality of people to whom the insight relates.
We can see from these definitions that the nature, role, and purpose of management and leadership are quite different. Management is an organisational function while leadership is best understood as a phenomenon of human affairs. They fall into different categories of thought and to put them into the same category of thought, as many do, often unintentionally, is to commit the logical blunder of a category error.
These definitions establish the formal conceptual distinctions between management and leadership and, in that sense, answer the first question posed. We take it, however, that there is more depth to the question in terms of what the meaning of each is – that is, what practical difference the difference between them makes for people.
Two orders of mind
The immediate practical difference, as argued in The Leadership Mind (2022), is the different levels of development of meaning- and truth-making capability required for management and leadership. We refer to these orders of mind as ‘The Management Mind’ and ‘The Leadership Mind’, respectively.
The distinction between the two kinds of minds relates to the distinction between two ways of thinking and the distinct roles they play in operating at uncertainty. These are considered in Chapter 6 of The Leadership Mind.
‘The Management Mind’ is defined as: an order of mind that is potentially capable of using concepts and theories as an apparatus of mind to help it think independently and can take responsibility for the selection and use of concepts and theories.
‘The Leadership Mind’ is defined as: an order of mind potentially capable of operating naturally through the faculty of imagination at the uncertainty arising from the degree of complexity of the world in which we live in order to sense a new beginning through insight into people, their situation, and their prospects.
A key feature of ‘The Management Mind’ is that it is concerned with designed order thinking as an organisation requires it for operating at uncertainty. The key feature of ‘The Leadership Mind’ is that it is concerned with emergent order thinking as is required to operate at the degree of the complexity of the world in which we live.
Designed order thinking is necessarily constrained by the past, by knowledge; emergent order thinking is not – it is the ability to conceive what is beyond the current horizon. The right balance of these modes is important for how we can relate correctly to uncertainty and shapes how we should think in a world of uncertainty.
Thus, the answer to the first question, in brief, is that management ends within the realm of designed order thinking and leadership begins within the realm of emergent order thinking.
A further answer
There is still a fundamental practical difference relating to the level of personal development required for each way of thinking and the judgement-making capability associated with each.
‘The Management Mind’ operates as a singular, individualised lens reflecting how one person organises their experiences into the meanings and truths hat govern their conduct and behaviour. In contrast, ‘The Leadership Mind’ is an expanded capability for holding multiple standpoints, including one’s own.
The achievement of ‘The Management Mind’ is how it relates to concepts and theory, their selection and use, in constructing its realities. These are now, unlike at a previous level of development, ‘tools of thought’, consciously chosen and used to organise experiences into meanings and truths, albeit from the standpoint of the user.
The achievement of ‘The Leadership Mind’ is the capability of stepping outside one’s own framework to hold multiple standpoints and, thereby, allowing for the integrating kinds of connections and interconnections that have the potential to generate insights about people, their situations, and their prospects commensurate with the complexity of the world.
‘The Leadership Mind’ naturally encompasses ‘The Management Mind’. In doing this, it also relates to others through concepts and theories in the same way as ‘tools of thought’. But the higher order will obviously bring a greater capability to concept and theory selection and using, especially in the judgement-making that this involves.
The difference between these two orders of mind brings into sharp relief a clear distinction between the organisational function of management and the phenomena of leadership, and that they each belong to different categories despite the common tendency to confuse them, because of an error of logic as argued in Chapter 2 of The Leadership Mind.
Moving towards ‘The Management Mind’ and ‘The Leadership Mind’
‘The Management Mind’ and ‘The Leadership Mind’ are demanded for different purposes by the world in which business organisations must operate today. Both are rooted in their respective developmental capabilities, and this brings us to the answer to the second question: why is the shift from management to leadership difficult?
The answer is because they are different in nature and, while both require personal development, ‘The Leadership Mind’ requires reaching a higher order of mind, a level of personal development of meaning and truth-making capability, that the majority of people do not reach. It is also the case that ‘The Management Mind’ requires personal development to an order beyond deferring to external authorities, the central feature of its predecessor, the order of mind at which most people still plateau.
The personal development required is, simply, the reason why it is difficult to shift from management to leadership at the order required by the mental demands of the world in which we live.
