What do you think of when you hear the words “management” and “leadership”?
I used to think of managers as people who didn’t do real work and interfered with the people doing the real work, whereas leaders were these inspirational figures who could get people to do the right thing no matter where they found themselves.
Those understandings have been changing for me.
A friend recently shared this great 3:30 video from the Lean Enterprise Institute with Jim Womack: Too Much Leadership and Not Enough Management. You can understand it at 2x speed, if that’s how you like to consume audio.
My current understanding of his point: leaders are not bad, but they are rare, and the need for these heroic figures suggests that something is amiss. We want systems that come as close to guaranteeing success as we can have, and leaders are folks who are able to transcend systems. We don’t want our systems to need being transcended.
What do you think? What’s your impression of these two concepts, and what do you think about what Womack says?
