Managing Or Leading - Which One Are You Doing??   Last week I was teaching a leadership programme for new leaders and this key question of what is the difference between leading and managing came up quite a bit.  They are not the same thing.  Also, most of those so called “leaders” are only managing and not doing much leading. In Japan, we promote people into leadership roles running sections and don’t give them any training.  They continue with this pattern throughout their career, rising, ever rising, but never doing much leading on the way up.   Managers are the Swiss watch mechanics.  All the little interlocking wheels must be properly aligned, integrated, running in a well oiled fashion, not suffering from breakdowns or disruptions. The point is efficiency of process, in both design and execution.  It does require adroitness to create work arounds, when things lurch out of control or to apply first aid solutions to an open wound in the system.  A mastery of logistics and detail makes the job much easier. This would drive me crazy by the way. A leader wants more than that.   A leader must be a capable Swiss watch mechanic but also a high performance coach. Behind all of the star athletes and a good many of the top performers in business are their coaches.  The elevation of tasks above managing are all about the soft skills.  It doesn’t matter if you are the most talented software engineer if you are a dork and nobody wants to be around you, let alone led by you.  Having tremendous current knowledge of the latest accounting standards changes is great but the people working for you don’t care all that much.  They are more interested in, “what are you going to do for me?”.   Being a tyrant used to work a charm once upon a time.  Instilling fear into people to get them to do your bidding, made leading pretty easy.  Barking out orders like a pirate captain was good fun too.  Yelling abuse at staff who made errors was thought to be morale boosting by showing others why they should be more careful.  Life was so much easier.    I was listening to the global head of Abobe, Shantanu Narayan speak here in Tokyo last week.  He made the point that all of his IP or Intellectual Property goes home every night and he hopes they decide to come back the next day and continue at Adobe. This is the reality, good people can be highly mobile and if the leader isn’t chiming in with them, they leave. In Japan, this dictum has now been extended all the way down to the highly mediocre.  Even the very average staff are still needed, because the shortage of workers means it is very hard to replace them.  Someone doing an okay job is better than the disruption of them leaving and facing the long, laborious and expensive process of identifying their replacement.   The retain component of the leader’s job in Japan is broken up into a couple of incendiaries.  Salary will blow you up because people even more desperate than you will outbid you for staff.  We had interviewed a candidate a number of times, things were looking good.  On Thursday evening he was very “excited” to have the meeting the next day when the job offer would be made.  Friday morning he told the recruiter that he taken another job.  He didn’t even bother to hear my offer.  We had been out bid by another company.  He was good, but I wouldn’t describe him as brilliant or exceptional or any other descriptor you would actually prefer to the hang around the neck of a prospective employee.    Another incendiary is our communication capability.  Busy bosses start to not communicate much with anyone, apart from during the slay of continuous meetings they are trailing through each day.  This type of communication is very agenda driven, concise, business like and bereft of the human touch.  “Where are we with the project”, “what are the numbers showing”, “are we on track to finish well”, “what is the run rate” etc.    Not much milk of human kindness in that lot.  And that is the problem.  We beco