Management and Leadership: Are all managers leaders?

Management & Leadership

On this second edition of the Knowledge Sharing Series, I will share with you, my learnings and journey down management lane. I will talk about my understanding of the difference between management and leadership, whether people are born leaders or learn to be leaders, cultural considerations in leadership and management and the types of leadership I have been exposed to. 

As I shared on my first blog tittle “Leadership in Challenging Times”, I believe that, my Social Work education did not prepare me to lead or manage. I believe that I had people’s skills and I had a solid knowledge of the issues impacting the population I was working with and I believed that I was ready to move away from frontline work. I believe I operated instinctively and most importantly, I was committed to the work (clients, teams and organizations). I’d like to remind you (the readers) that this is not an academic article on the topics I mentioned above and instead, this is my perspective and experience on these topics.

 Management vs Leadership

I now understand that I started out as a manager who was so grateful to have been given the opportunity to move up into management, that I did not pay attention to how I was going to do it or even if I was being fairly compensated.  

In hindsight, I would have liked to have understood the difference between management and leadership at the very beginning of my management journey. If you were to ask me now what my journey has taught be about the difference, I’d say that, I now understand that, management is a process of getting things done to achieve a goal and it involves controlling things and people. Leadership is how one gets others to work with you to achieve the goals. 

Therefore, a manager is focused on the process and how to control those who play a role on making things happen to achieve the goal. A leader focusses on the impact the management processes have on the people they are entrusted to lead and in doing so, they will make sure that the goal that needs to be achieved is shared with the people working alongside them. I have learned that when staff feel they have a stake in the outcome, they will follow their leader in the process of making things happen.

I definitely started out as manager and grew into a leader later in my professional development. I believe I focused on the task at hand and wanted to make sure that I was meeting the goals set by the organizations I worked at. I needed to demonstrate that I could run the ship and although, I considered myself a good person, I definitely needed to grow in some very critical skill areas for effective leadership. Particularly, I needed to pay attention to something I thought I was pretty good at, which was “self-awareness”. 

Imagine my surprise when a staff told me that she was scared of me! I was shocked and to be honest, a bit irritated with this staff lol. I thought to myself “how could she say she was scared of me? I have been nothing but nice and accommodating to her!” 

I failed to realize that it was not about how nice of a person I thought I was, and it had more to do with that staff’s perception of me, their past experiences with management and most importantly, it had to do with my position of power as the manager. It was a painful realization but once I accepted that I had “power” and it had a lot of weight, I was open to accept that my actions as a manager may have a negative impact on the people that I supervised. On a later edition of this series, I will blog on managing power skillfully.

I was focused on making changes to improve service delivery, communication systems, supply chain, budgeting and other management-related tasks and did not focus enough on how to facilitate change for my team. Although the changes were necessary, I needed to ensure that the impact of these changes were positive for everyone affected by them. 

As a manager, I knew what the work (service delivery) should look like, particularly because I had many years of frontline experience. This and the fact that I was now managing my peers did not help the situation. I now know that, what was required of me, was to manage systems and lead my team and as one of my colleagues who I considered a mentor told me, I needed to be hard on issues and soft on people. This was one of the most valuable lessons I learned. Thank you my friend! 

As I developed in my management journey, I had to balance my - sometimes - conflicting roles of managing and leading. Another important lesson I learned by trial and error, was how to facilitate change. I soon realized that “because, I said so” did not work if I wanted my team to support my change efforts. On a later blog, I will share how I learned to facilitate change skillfully. In fact, this is an ongoing lesson for me.

 

Natural Born-Leader vs Acquired Leadership Skills

I find the “nature” versus “environment” argument about leadership very interesting. As a child and teenager, I had very strong interpersonal skills. Some people said that I was born to lead because I had an acute ability to articulate my thoughts and at a young age (in other words, I talked too much and continue to do so lol), and I had a pretty good sense of justice. I think this allowed me to stand out amongst my peers throughout my schooling and employment. Regardless of what I thought were my natural abilities around leadership, I was clearly missing some very critical skills which I learned later with life experience and academically through enrolment in an International Masters of Business Administration (IMBA) program. 

I have to admit that most of what I learned about being a leader, I learned with my teams who were my biggest teachers. It was instant learning. If I did or said something that did not go well with them, I’d know because I would not get the results that would take me closer to achieving the goals set by me or the organization. I soon realized that leading others was a very complex thing to do and that it required that I first and foremost, know the people I supervised.

 Cultural Context & Cultural Competency

I was brought up to respect everyone regardless of who they are and especially my elders. I was also taught that I should never “toot my own horn”, that I should let others complement me on my achievements. 

My frame of reference regarding leadership was packed with political context. Growing up, leaders were often associated with politics and unfortunately, they were not often the people I wanted to emulate as I felt that they were force-fed to us as the picture of leadership. 

I grew up in a communist/socialist environment and I have to say that I often, even as a young person felt that the implementation of such political system went against my grain. Of course, I don’t think I had the maturity to critically and intellectually analyze the pros and cons of communism/socialism, although as I said above, I had an acute sense of justice and the leaders I grew up with didn’t seem very just. 

Growing up, my recollections of many people in management positions in any given area of work, were of people with a level of arrogance, superiority and mightiness complex and often they were very mean to people. Their personalities and characteristics hindered their ability to manage their power skillfully.

When I first entered management, I approached it with a great deal of humility and soon realized that others perceive me as lacking confidence. I struggled to assert myself because I did not want to go against my upbringing and did not want to be like the managers I grew up watching. I often felt like there was a constant conflict between my family cultural values and this western culture that was now part of my life. Many times I felt that, in a way, my upbringing cheated me, because as child while I was being taught humility and modesty, children in this western society were being taught to think  that they were the best and God’s gift to earth.

I came to Canada at the age of 17 and had never worked in my motherland. Therefore, all my experience of being managed/supervised is from a western perspective. I have experienced good and bad management as a frontline staff. 

One of the first things I noticed was that whenever the topic of culture and diversity came up, it was often limited to customs connected with food, clothing, music, and dance, all attributes that one can easily see, hear and speak about. The problem I found with this, is that it really lacked a deeper engagement and understanding of the other person’s experience. Things like cultural values and how people saw and experienced life, were not usually discussed.

I have learned to look at the issue of culture, differently. I decided that the things that made me different from other persons were the things that I should be more attentive to and invest more in. I learned that I needed to be curious and courageous if I was truly going to become “culturally competent”. 

I think that western culture has found a very safe and comfortable way to address cultural differences but such safety has not necessarily been effective in supporting diversity (multiculturalism) nor has it been effective in preventing racism, xenophobia and discrimination in general. If we only stay within the comfort of celebrating “difference”, we miss out on being proactive and finding out about how cultural differences play out in the workplace. 

Well, I won’t go down too deep into the political hole but I’d like to share my thoughts and experience with what I consider cultural competence to be, particularly within the context of management and leadership. I learned that I don’t agree with the term “Cultural Competence” because I think that the word “competence” is a bit problematic as I find it to be loaded with implicit judgement. I think it is unrealistic for someone to be “competent” in someone else’s culture. I much prefer the term “Cultural Awareness”.

I learned that my curiosity about other people’s cultures broadened my concept of culture to include everything that makes that person who they are within the context of their immediate environment (family) and the larger environment (community and society). I became curious about peoples “frames of reference”, how they experienced joy, grief, their views on power, authority, connection, boundaries, success, failure, etc... 

I learned that my biggest lessons on cultural awareness happened after experiencing friction between me and another person, usually someone I supervised or someone who supervised me. There were some incidents that shaped my appreciation for curiosity because the incidents left me asking myself “what else do I need to know about this person to ensure that my good intentions don’t impact them negatively in the future?”

Being curious is not enough, I also needed to be courageous to ask questions about other people’s culture. You may ask why a person needs to be courageous about asking questions. I don’t know about you, but, one of the challenges I have found with the way we relate to culture awareness in this western society, is that in my experience, we usually operate from two distinct but equally ineffective ways: a) fear-based approach and b) hate-based approach. 

The fear-based approach is a result of hyper alertness informed by the guilt and shame that many privileged people (race, class, religion) feel about historical wrongs done to marginalized peoples. Sometimes, such persons confuse “stereotyping” with genuine curiosity and cultural awareness. The fear of stereotyping a person often prevents us from asking questions that will create opportunities for deep learning and effective inclusive workplaces and environments. Unfortunately we end up “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”.

We have also become afraid of making “assumptions”. When I was in Social Work school, I was taught that in order for workers to engage in preparatory empathy, we needed to make certain assumptions about what may be going on with our clients. For example, if I am working at a shelter for victims/survivors of domestic violence, I needed to assume that the client may walk into the shelter feeling emotionally vulnerable, perhaps scared or crying and that I needed to be prepared to make sure that I provided the best support possible. 

These assumptions were the result of factual information gathered by Violence Against Women (VAW) practitioners from incidents of domestic violence where victims sought the supports of VAW service providers. Practitioners noticed that there were common effects that domestic violence and violence against women had on victims.  

Now, we all know that not every survivor of domestic violence presents the same and to assume that they do, would be “stereotyping”. However, having some preparatory assumptions, is helpful for workers to tap into their empathetic selves and for them to be ready to attend to the client’s needs. 

A leader or manager who superficially engages in cultural awareness practices runs the risk of creating environments that work against their efforts to be inclusive and equitable. All this to say that, in spite of their often well-intentioned efforts, people who carry historical oppression guilt and shame, are not effective allies nor are they effective supervisors, manager or leaders. They often engage in patronizing behavior and possess a “God-like complex” behavior that sees them needing to constantly save the poor oppressed staff or are extremely surprised to see that people from marginalized communities actually can exist outside of their protection. I will focus more on these areas later in future blogs about the nature of “oppression”.

Hate-based approaches to cultural awareness are less complex because they are clear and in your face and do not camouflaged, giving the victims of hate-based cultural awareness an opportunity to address it or find protection. 

In my experience, hate-based cultural awareness is informed by oppressive systems and practices (racism, classism, trans/homophobia, Islamophobia, etc.), whether covert or overt which promote discrimination (stereotypes) and the deliberate exclusion of people from marginalized communities. Within the context of management and leadership, hate-based cultural awareness is very detrimental for those targeted by it. Workplaces with leaders and managers that subscribe to hate-based cultural awareness practices usually engage in stereotyping, undermining, exclusionary and unfair behaviors thus creating very toxic work environments.

 

Leadership Styles

As mentioned above, I started out as a very humble manager and my leadership style was heavily informed by my family cultural values and had negative experiences as people (those I managed or other management colleagues) began to question my confidence, knowledge and competencies. As a result, I unnaturally began to assert myself and made sure that people knew that, I knew what I was doing and that I was in charge. 

One of the things that really challenged me was to come across dishonest people because, “honesty” was another value that I was taught. I often had the “all or nothing” and “this or that” approach but life as a manager soon taught me that seeing things in such extremes was not going to allow me to be the supervisor and leader I yearned to be. 

I realized that I needed to find a balance between keeping my cultural identity and values and adopting new ones to add to my management tool belt. Once I got the “be tough on issues and soft on people” thing down-packed I found that balance.    At some point I made peace with the fact that many people would view my management style as non-traditional and perhaps not legitimate. In fact, my cultural make-up has shaped the manager and leader I became and I am quite proud of it. 

Below, I will share two leadership styles that I have been exposed to which are a) Rigid Leadership and b) Mindful Collaborative Leadership. Both styles of leadership have marked my employment history and leadership journey.

Rigid leadership

This type of leadership does not promote innovation and collaboration. I call this style of management the “because I said so” leadership style. Leaders that adopt this style often have a very narrow vision and do not promote creativity and innovation in their teams. They are usually unable to delegate because they aim to control every aspect of the work and the people that work under their leadership and supervision. Such leaders seem to be insecure about themselves and miss-manage their power to the point of being abusive to their staff. Many do not recognize the power they have or think that such power is inherently theirs to use anyway they see fit. Do you recognize this style of leadership?

  Mindful Collaborative Leadership

Leaders who embrace collaboration are usually open-minded and confident. They are not afraid to share the spotlight and in fact encourage their teams to take initiative. This is my favorite style of leadership! I believe that this style allows for leaders to promote greater responsibility within their staff teams by attributing to them a level of autonomy. 

Collaborative leaders are not confused about who has the authority. They recognize the power they have and know that ultimately the buck stops with them. Collaborative leaders are genuine and clear with their team about their roles and expectations. They feel comfortable and confident making decision that may not be so popular with their teams because they have built enough trust within the work environment. Teams led by mindful collaborative managers support unpopular decisions made by their leaders because they believe that their leader is well-intentioned and can be trusted to see the best possible outcomes. 

I often shared with my staff teams that “consensus is not about everyone agreeing with the same thing. It is about everyone agreeing to make a decision even if they don’t agree with it”. Collaborative leaders are often able to facilitate change effectively because they are thoughtful of the change process and include their teams in the change process from the beginning. Whenever I had to make a difficult decision, I had the understanding and the trust of my team because I worked hard to build a work culture of transparency and collaboration.

I end with reminding all that read my articles/blogs, that the assertions I make are my perspectives that resulted from my experiences in management. I still have a lot of growing to do and I am happy to share what I have learned so far. Needless to say, I am passionate about the topic of management and leadership and believe that like, me many middle managers yearn for a platform that can validate some of the experiences, challenges and opportunities that management has offered us. I believe that all managers are not necessarily leaders and not all leaders are managers. I think that like me, many managers perfect their leadership skills while managing. We learn to manage systems and lead people!

Until next time,

 Carla Neto