How management undermines leadership

“Leadership” and “management” are both contested terms, but their status demonstrates how the concepts are travelling in opposite directions.

Management is grey in both senses of the word. It is unglamorous, but also unaccountable – hovering somewhere above us and out of reach, even out of sight. We think of management as not only operating in the shadows but also creating the shadows. (Let’s exempt football managers, who are both out in the open and very much on the hook.) “Managed out” has become a euphemism for getting someone out of the organisation without them taking legal action.

Leadership is equally difficult to define but for opposite reasons. Leadership is the halo we attach to heroes – after they have succeeded. You know a good leader when you see one, people say. In retrospect – maybe; beforehand – harder to say.

Despite this scepticism about management and our professed love of leaders, somehow we keep finding a surfeit of the former and a scarcity of the latter. A management tier, once constituted, is automatically considered bloated. And even the most routine organisational shortcoming can prompt the accusation of an absence of leadership.

How can we explain this perpetual bad luck, worsening all the time: to have so much of a thing we distrust and so little of a quality that is so in demand?

And of course that’s exactly the point. Management is the target of our frustration, while leadership is the recipient of our admiration. And human beings always find more to criticise than to praise.

There is something else, too. Management is bound up with our concept of a system. Indeed, management depends on a system for its survival and usually serves the system as a result. In his new book The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies puts it like this: “Any organisation in a modern society will tend to restructure itself to reduce the amount of personal responsibility attributable to its actions.” In contrast, leadership usually relies on autonomy and a measure of scepticism about organisational rules.

That’s why the critical divide between leadership and management is personal risk. In protecting the system, managers are incentivised to avoid or mitigate risk – or shift risk onto others. It’s ironic that the concept of “de-risking” has become a positive management cliché. But de-risking things is exactly what we fear management is always doing: de-risking things for themselves. In other words: not leading, but managing.

And risk is what we admire about real leadership. A leader, by definition, is exposed to uncertain outcomes. They take positions and the risks that come with them. That’s probably leadership’s most essential characteristic. Beneath the surface, effective leaders are often less gung-ho about which risks they take than their popular image suggests. But they know for sure that not taking any risks at all is a close proxy for the absence of leadership. If you’re not on the hook, you’re not the real thing.

Contrasting attitudes towards risk are revealed in how people communicate. Whatever you think about his politics, Elon Musk is confident about communicating in public with unashamed content – and without fear of causing offence. He takes risks with words. That’s why Musk looks modern whereas so many politicians look dated.

In fact, we can usually detect the absence of leadership through a surfeit of highly “professional” communications advice. Modern communication (essentially, PR) is good at helping public figures get through the day without making mistakes. Which has the unfortunate side-effect of making them gun-shy about saying anything interesting at all. PR is a short-term industry that creates long-term disappointment. That leads to my hypothesis that PR, because it is designed to serve management, actually thwarts leadership.

A couple of years ago, I took part in a Q&A at a society of cricket fans. I had recently been working for the England cricket team; they were mostly fans of county cricket. So, we loved the same sport; but from broadly different (and sometimes contradictory) perspectives. If I could have summarised their collective view of me, I would have guessed it was something like: “Not quite one of us.”

The first half went easily enough – a few jokes, a little self-deprecation, some stories about the good old days, respectful anecdotes about legends of yesteryear, everything contentious nicely avoided. You might say I had managed the situation.

Then, at the interval, I felt something approaching self-disgust. In front of me, I had a couple of hundred intelligent cricket fans and yet I had not taken on the big subjects or attempted to influence them. I had said nothing brave or challenging. All I had done was the easy stuff.

To nudge me towards being more outspoken, I imagined that a couple of my close friends, people still working at the sharp end of the England cricket administration, had arrived for the second half of my talk. Sitting in the front row, they brought with them a deep understanding of the frustrations and difficulties that come with trying to make England teams highly successful (challenges I had also lived with and knew only too well).

Could I lead the whole room to have a better grasp of how English cricketing systems could give the England team a systemic advantage, not just a few moments of fleeting supremacy? My answer at the outset of the second half began: “You’re not going to like this, but…”

Management, at its worst, wastes time by creating work. Leadership does the opposite.

When we communicate, we should model the same principle. The feeling of time being wasted – the speaker’s and the listener’s – is a sure signal that managerialism is choking out leadership.

Ed Smith is director of the Institute of Sports Humanities and the author of Making Decisions