What’s the difference between a leader and a manager?

For purposes of the Department of the Defense’s mission and activities, one will urge you to “take that hill” while the other will require you to “meet program goals within budget.”

Of course, that’s a crude oversimplification, especially since the study referenced in an article by Brittany Ballenstadt (govexec.com) fails to define the two executive types other than to acknowledge one deals with fighting more than figuring. 

Managers, i.e., non-service “leaders,” deal with fighting, too, as in bureaucratic turf and other battles, but these usually happen without the presence of armaments.

Seriously, please read Brittany’s article and the four-page Policy Brief by two researchers at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs.  Then, share your reactions.

Relatively dated employee surveys (2002 & 2004; the most recent 2006 evaluation was not included) are not my idea of the most valuable insight into analyzing and understanding the difference in nature and effectiveness of leaders and managers in military v. non-military enterprises.  However, within the Department of Defense, due to its commitment of frequent rotation of its military “leaders” into non-service executive positions which require a greater management skill and orientation, there is a lesson to be learned about proper deployment of its highest-level employees.

Several things concern me about this study, and I consider them fairly serious shortcomings:

Ø      Findings are stratified by length of employee tenure.  In general, the longer one serves in a given office, the more positive will be that employee’s assessment of the office, its management, desirability as a place to work, etc.   This doesn’t strike me as particularly noteworthy or significant, as I believe it is reasonable to expect the more-tenured employees would be prone to greater contentment/comfort within their organizations and positions otherwise they would have moved or been moved by management to other jobs before they lasted there for three or four years.

Ø      Lack of comparable quantitative performance data between military and non-service Defense agencies required use of the softer, less analytically and interpretatively valuable qualitative measures of an employee survey.  Granted, it would be very difficult to construct performance metrics that would make possible comparable evaluation of an Army unit capturing an Iraqi outpost at a cost of “x” casualties and “y” lost or damaged tanks and humvees with managing a multi-billion dollar program to procure thousands of tanks and humvees.  Yet, if this cannot be done, what’s the point?  What is learned without a clear, congruent insight into interdependent military and non-service activities within the Defense Department to ensure that they achieve their overarching mission and goal of preserving national security?

Ø      Employee surveys are always heavily influenced by the personality and temperament of the incumbent executive at the time of the survey.  As a result, researcher ability is marginalized to extend conclusions across agencies, as there can be no reasonable expectation at survey time that the mixture of executive personalities and abilities across organizational lines was roughly comparable.

Notwithstanding the above qualifications, I feel that the real “significant” finding is that employees rated retired military personnel with higher education (advanced degrees) and private management credentials up to 10 percentage points better than other leaders and managers.

As mentioned at the end of the Policy Brief, this finding could be very helpful when considering “…the primary mission of an agency and who is needed to lead that agency.”

What’d’ya think?

Does your organization need a leader or a manager?   Does it need both?  Can any person turn from role of leader into manager at will and exactly at the proper moment?  Do we need more leaders today or more managers?

Fred Apelquist, contributing editor

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