by Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth, Shingo Faculty Fellow

The year: 1989. Florida Power & Light had just won the Deming Prize, Japan’s national quality award, and became the first company outside of Japan to do so. Congratulations poured in from all over the world and deservedly so. The words of the company’s CEO, Charles Turner, struck a particularly insightful note:

The biggest obstacle to improving productivity is management’s inability to recognize that it must lead the company out of its productivity problems—not manage it out. There is a great deal of difference. Leading means setting the vision, inspiring others by example, and following up to see that the vision is met.

Yes, managing and leading are closely linked—yet not only are they not the same thing, but it is crucial to keep them separate and distinct. Yes, each has a major contribution to make in the enterprise, but sequence matters. Begin with managing and you may find it hard to adopt a leader mindset. Begin with leadership and managing can and must align with it and become a useful adjunct.      

Managing is a peace-time activity. Its usual behaviors focus on steadiness and constancy: keep things going, stay on an even keel. We monitor, track, and check. And then we check again. Management is about stabilization. Leadership is about expansion. Management creates short-term safety and a knowable future. Leadership creates short-term risk and long-term growth that is often transformative. These are different outcomes; they require different means.

When I went to college, I dreamt of becoming a linguist. But I did not know how to get there from New Jersey. Instead, I became a Latin teacher. As things turned out, I have become a linguist—of sorts. My field of research and deployment is the workplace, and the language I have come to study is visuality—visual information-sharing. The vocabulary of this workplace language is the array of visual devices that lets the workplace speak on all organizational levels.  

As I help companies convert to visuality, these devices make concrete and crystal clear the telling difference between leading and managing. The visual vocabulary for effective managers includes a heavy dose of KPI dashboard, variability tracking, metrics that drive, and visual problem solving. The visual vocabulary for effective leaders, by contrast, is anchored in four visual tools or constructs: 1) Operations Systems Improvement Template, 2) X-Type Matrix, 30 Operations RoadMap, and 4) the War Room. Yes, outcomes for leaders are different from those for managers and so must be the tools for achieving those outcomes.

Managing means monitoring and adjusting. Leading means deciding and driving. Deciding what? Deciding to say yes to the few and knowing why—and wait to the many and knowing why not—and then driving those few. This does not, in any way, diminish the crucial contribution effective leaders make (and must make) in formulating—and inspiring enrollment in—the vision, mission, values, and beliefs of the enterprise. This is always a core leadership undertaking, just as effective managers are indispensable in the deployment of them. But our focus today is on delineating the telling difference between leading and managing, not on where they intersect.  

The linguist in me uncovered validation for this when I charted the origins of the word manage. Manage derives from two Latin words: manus (hand) and agere (to act). From Latin, the term traveled into old French (manèger) and Italian (maneggiare). Both meant “to handle” but in a very specific (and to me, unanticipated) context: “to handle or control horses.”

This journey of meaning is instructive, helping us to understand more fully Charles Turner’s warning about the futility of trying to manage our way out of productivity problems. Self-made billionaire, philanthropist, and two-time third-party presidential candidate Ross Perot said it another way: “Inventories can be managed. People must be led.”

By the 15^th century, the word manage had entered the English language, having already morphed in French and Italian into the more modern definition, “to direct, handle, or cope with a situation by making adjustments.”

To this day, the relationship in some companies between the executive and managers is an inflexible hierarchy that leaves the leader in rarefied isolation, with very little synergistic support. This is a leftover from a time when the head honcho was, literally, a king. When the time came, the industrial revolution adopted the only form of leading it knew—that of the monarch and, to an equal extent, high-level military commander. Combine them and we have the dictator. Certainly, any number of 19^th and 20^th century executives paraded around like dictators and were treated as such. Their decisions were edicts, with any deviation punished by demotion or termination. When the Japanese model began to make inroads in western leadership thinking, its formulation seemed to resemble a circle, with its emphasis on participation and the semblance of parity that circles suggest. Though relying on input from others, the Japanese leadership framework was nonetheless a hierarchy. Position mattered.

I had the honor and pleasure of working with Shigeo Shingo in the last decade of his life and meeting Taiichi Ohno, the co-architects of the famed Toyota Production System. Neither man was known for his patience, warmth, or affability.  Both were decisive. Both were driven. Both were drivers. They were what I call barracuda leaders. Their respect was for humanity, and they were always hungry for “lunch”—the next improvement breakthrough. In my book, they were born leaders.

Being a boss is not the same as leading. The first job of a leader is to notice that difference and focus on good leading. When bosses don’t, they often spend precious corporate and personal resources monitoring and tweaking, but without understanding why they are not able to move the enterprise forward—or, in some cases, prevent it from sinking.

Winston Churchill is a superb example of a highly effective leader facing crushing challenges. In personality and pre-disposition, he represents the categorical opposite of the many currently popular catchphrases that support a neutralized, low-authority leadership model. That is precisely why his book, Memoirs of the Second World War, holds such great value to me. It provides—in gripping detail—a compelling, practical profile of the leader in crisis.  

What chief executive, before or since, faced a more complex set of tasks and trials than Churchill, with so few resources over such an extended period? In a time when the masters of industry struggle to balance their role as corporate operatives, financial stewards, and protectors of stockholder value, Churchill’s words—in and between the lines—provide an instructive and inspiring leadership case study.

We learn from Churchill’s example that a leader:

1. Holds tight to a seemingly impossible vision in the face of rampant populist, peer, political, and enemy opposition.
2. Takes advantage of every conceivable avenue for operationalizing his vision.
3. Does not allow himself to be sidetracked, even by dramatic distractions (e.g., Russia’s confounding flipflop).
4. Does not let his own mistakes defeat him. (And he made many.)
5. Develops many ways for citizens to contribute to small crucial victories so they recognize they are part of a greater outcome (e.g., Dunkirk, thousands of citizen wardens watching the skies during the blitzkrieg).
6. Remains highly visible, using himself as a crucial focal point for national identity, alignment, and hope.
7. Takes care of his physical ability to lead, including highly disciplined afternoon naps, so he is present and alert for Britain’s terrible night-time war.
8. Builds a tough circle of allies, though few began as staunch supporters.
9. Is visible and expressive in his love of country, the British people, honor, fairness, and strength.
10. Demonstrates in himself the courage he needs from others.

Like all great leaders, Churchill did not make the rules that define leadership. Through his example, however, he draws us into naming them for ourselves. He helps us remember what is often forgotten: leading and managing are not the same thing.