Is Management Leadership?

How is leadership related to management?  According to the Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge magazine, not at all. 

Let's start with what makes a great manager:  They grasp what is the essential strength of each person and capitalize on it.  As the article says memorably, "they play chess, not checkers."  In other words, everyone who reports to you is different—thank God!  Suss out what each member of your team excels at, and let them concentrate on that.  How can you figure out what everyone's real strengths are, as opposed to the "strengths" they'll list if you ask them point-blank?  Don't ask point-blank:  Instead, ask an open-ended question such as, "What was the best day you've had at work in the last three months?"  Listen with tremendous attentiveness to how they describe what they were doing and what results they obtained. 

But wait, if everyone has a special strength, doesn't everyone also have a special weakness?  To be sure.  The secret here is to ignore them—or rather, to manage around them.  Do not, in other words, assign someone with no head for details to manage a multi-office project.  (And to diagnose weaknesses, ask about the worst day lately.)

This may all sound logical and perhaps even obvious, but a somewhat counterintuitive psychological insight lies behind it:  Self-awareness, it turns out, isn't what it's cracked up to be.  (Maybe it is if your career is in poetry, but not if it's in business.)   Consider:

"[Self-assurance,] not self-awareness, is the strongest predictor of a person's ability to set high goals, to persist in the face of obstacles, to bounce back when reversals occur, and, ultimately, to achieve the goals they set. By contrast, self-awareness has not been shown to be a predictor of any of these outcomes, and in some cases, it appears to retard them."

Thus playing to people's strengths and continually reinforcing them ("I knew you could do it because you're such a good [analyst/writer/negotiator/presenter, etc...]") is how to turn talents into performance.  Don't worry about the weaknesses; trying to remedy them is a job even the person's parents evidently couldn't master, so who are you to try?  Rather, focus on proven strengths, reinforce them, and urge people to aspire to greater challenges using what they already know they can do well.

So are leaders different?  Yes:  While the most effective managers tailor their approach to each individual, leaders tap into what is universal and capitalize upon the few universal uber-truths we all share to inspire a vision of a better future, cutting across all distinctions of race, age, gender, or attainment level.  

Managers use projects and individuals. Leaders use stories and heroes.