Management vs. Leadership

They’re different, and recognizing it will be important for flatter organizations

It seems more companies, including mine, are putting more focus on independent contributors (IC) and less so on managers. With this shift in focus, many managers had to make the hard decision to move to an IC role. I won’t get into the merits and demerits of a higher IC to manager ratio as I’m still trying to understand the impacts of a flatter, more IC heavy organization. However, the recent changes does point to the importance of leadership. 

Management confers authority and accountability. When building out an organization, it’s important to have people accountable and exercising authority to ensure teams are operating to reasonable standards and espousing our culture and values. Leadership, however, is something that is much harder to obtain. In fact, reflecting on my own career, I was a manager well before I became a leader. Leadership takes time and comes in different forms. Leadership can come from crafting a skill to the point of becoming an expert. Leadership can come from having wisdom that’s worth sharing. And leadership can come from being a reliable steward of an organization’s culture and principles. So looking at organizations today, while there are fewer managers, we still have a lot of leaders, and I think it’s incumbent on organizations to properly identify these leaders, empower them to act, and recognize them for their impact. 

The “how” is going to be important, and one I don’t have all the answers to yet. But I think a good starting point to empowering leaders that are decentralized across an organization is to recognize that management is not leadership, and ICs can be, and often are, leaders in specific domains.