Women Know - Leadership is Only Part of the System

Michael Paul Ervick, MBA

“You don’t manage people.  You manage things.  You lead people.  We went overboard on the management and forgot about leadership.”

Navy Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, 1986

The amazing wisdom of Grace Hopper is often lost in the misapplication of this quote.  It is the back story that provides the context that allows the audience to appreciate what she was sharing.  There are few individuals today that doubt the discovery, exploration and understanding of leadership is critical to the guidance and governance of groups.  This is true whether dealing with the endeavors of a family, a business or our planet.  In order to better understand such concepts, there is a very natural tendency of the general population to analyze by isolating and reducing the concepts.  Unfortunately, this process requires that we disconnect the concept from the context of the greater system; and it is here that our understanding begins to unravel.  With that said, history has demonstrated that to focus only on leadership in the context of collective endeavors is a dangerous mistake.

Since the early 1970’s there has been an abundance of quality literature published claiming leadership and management are two very different things.  In essence, leadership is about relationships and action; management is about responsibility and accountability.  Together they form our system of organizational guidance and governance.  The authority of a manager is given by law, and it is limited to the assets and resources.  The authority of a leader is given by followers, and it is limited by trust and respect.  Sacrifice one for the other and our system of guidance and governance fails.

While the practices of leadership are as old as humankind, the practices of management are relatively new.  Today, the rights and responsibilities of management are recognized and defined across the categories of commercial, corporate, agency, contract, and tort law.

The words and concepts of “managers” and “management” evolved from the much older word “manage”.  Manage is originally derived from Latin.  In fact, in Spain, Italy and France, the local version of manage still means to train or handle horses.  Originally the act of managing focused on using animals to get work done.  The transition of the term from animal work to human work evolved in two phases.  Slaves were considered property like animals, so it was common to manage slaves.  Managing craftsmen and artisans on the other-hand was not at all common.  That is because they developed their capabilities through apprenticeships in the guild system.  Once the apprenticeship was completed, workers became known as journeymen, which indicated they could travel and work without supervision or management.  It is not until the emergence of the English factory system that term and concept of managing workers emerges in its modern sense.

Since the end of the Civil War, the concept of management has been transformed by intense social forces.  Prior to this period, our nation struggled with slavery and employment; even free men, women and children worked 14 hour days, seven days a week.  Before the outlaw of slavery, our culture recognized the relationship of employment as a property relationship whether freeperson or slave.

With the end of slavery, our social system evolved rapidly on views of work, labor and family.  By the end of the Great Depression, our system of guidance and governance was the envy of the world, and Frank Abrams of Standard Oil was the poster-child for the power of “stakeholder” relationships.  As the Second World War ended, we were exporting the idea of balance between leadership and management through a program called “Training Within Industry”.

When the war was over, we found ourselves in a new role as a world leader; rebuilding the nations and cultures of friend and foe.  While teaching the combined principles of good management and leadership to the rest of the world, the American industrial system was inconsistently sacrificing the very same principles.  For eight decades following the Civil War, we learned that leadership was about doing the right thing, and unfortunately that interfered with goals of increasing capacity, economies of scale and lowering cost to feed and supply a world destroyed by war.  Because we stopped focusing on the discipline, competency, systems and people, from 1950 to 1970 the United States had diluted leadership training in the name of management training.  Almost overnight, management shifted from being “stakeholder” oriented to being “shareholder” oriented.

The imbalance between leadership and management sent the US economy on a journey of cultural destruction.  The stakeholder relationships between management and labor – 80 years in the making – were shattered in the name of short-term cost savings.  But labor was not the only stakeholder relationship sacrificed; relationships with suppliers, lenders and even customers all suffered in the name of lowering costs or increasing prices to find more profit for the bottom-line.

As a culture we failed to appreciate that management was a system built on a foundation of leadership.  After the Second World War, to strengthen our management system, we undermined the leadership foundation.  The imbalance of a nationwide system of guidance and governance is devastating.  No one knew this better than the software pioneer and Navy Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper quoted at the beginning of this paper; she understood that managers and leaders are different sides of the same coin.

By the end of the 1980’s, Jack Welch had proven Admiral Hopper to be right.  Following the success of his famous turn-around at General Electric, leadership development became very popular.  Now, more than 20 years after the business culture of America embraced the notion that we had fallen behind in our capabilities of developing leaders, we find another problem.  Between the years of 1990 and 1995, a wave of major organizations around the country began investing in leadership development.  Based on their culture of cost control, they assumed that GE replaced their investments in management development with programs in leadership development.  By trying to imitate GE, many organizations only compounded their problems.  They failed to realize that GE was actually trying to correct past mistakes by re-balancing by adding investments in leadership to the existing management development program.

As a result, today the average American managers know as much about the principles of management as their predecessors did in the 1920’s.  The lack of responsibility, accountability and authority of management for the performance of promises is a major issue in all organizations.  The tremendous tools of management, developed since the end of the Civil War, have been disregarded for the last 20 years.  The management processes of planning, organizing, directing, coordinating and controlling the assets and resources of the organization have been completely forgotten.  The management directives of purpose, mission and vision have all been reduced to meaningless window dressing.

When considering the current state of the world, our social and cultural evolution has come a long way.  The progress made by other nations following the Second World War can be linked to the fact that we taught the principles of TWI around the world.  As each nation embraced and adapted these principles to the strengths of their culture, we saw them in a whole new light.  We can see the breakthroughs from thought-leaders in Japan, Israel, Greece, Germany and Sweden, and all have demonstrated that in a system of guidance and governance, the role of leadership is necessary but not sufficient by itself.  Great leaders must also be great managers.