Lt. Gen. George Patton with the signal corps, July 11th 1943, Sicily. (General George Patton Museum)
Most business professionals are familiar with the terms ‘management’ and ‘leadership’ and some even understand the difference. You know the old adages, ‘leaders do the right things – managers do things right’ and ‘we lead people and manage things’. Robert Sutton’s 2010 HBR article describes the distinction between leadership and management and proposes that leaders who distance themselves from management, as though it’s beneath them are out of touch. To use a popular project management saying, they’re ‘throwing dead cats over the fence’.
In my view, I believe we need to dive a little deeper. When I look at the iconic leaders of the past, I see an obvious distinction that I don’t see today. There’s a glaring difference between great leaders of the past such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela compared with Winston Churchill, Napoleon, or Genghis khan. The difference is that Dr. King, Gandhi, and Mandela led with the absence of authority and had to rely on their ability to influence their followers. When your followers have no choice but to follow your directions or suffer consequences, you are not leading per se. Rather, you are exercising your authority through command.
Unless you’ve served time in the military or similar emergency services, you probably wouldn’t think you’ve worked for a commander. In fact, you’ve probably never contemplated the differences between a leader and a commander, which is ironic as ‘command’ is what most people in “leadership positions” actually exercise – not leadership.
For true leadership to occur, there needs to be an absence of ‘authority’. An example of this is Dr. Martin Luther King, who was able to lead a generation of African Americans, of whom he had absolutely no authority over. He achieved this through his vision for equality and his ability to effectively articulate that vision.
So, if you have authority over the people you lead, that is, there are consequences for them not following your directions, you are a commander, not a leader! Maybe not in the military sense where insubordination and failure to comply with a lawful order is a summary offence and deserters can be shot. Rather, failing to follow your direction could result in the ‘offender’ being reprimanded or potentially fired.
In today’s world of Millennials and political correctness (PC), exercising command is seen as inappropriate; however, command is exactly what is needed. This doesn’t mean a dictatorial form of command such as Directive Control, where it’s “do as I say”, although the reality of business is that this type of command certainly still has a place. What it means in the business sense, is the employment of Mission Command, also known as “workplace empowerment”.
Mission Command provides direction by setting objectives (the Mission) and providing a set of parameters or ‘freedoms and constraints’ and a limit of exploitation known in business as delegation.
So are you a manager, a leader, or a commander? Now that you know the difference, I hope this will help you to ‘lead’ your followers better?
