It’s become vogue, particularly in the nonprofit field, to praise leaders and leadership as the needed remedy to challenges in the sector while vilifying bosses and management as outdated—or even backwards—modes of organizing. This follows a long trail of thought-leadership that began in 1977 when Abraham Zaleznik published his seminal article, “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” In the article, Zaleznik criticized the primary focus on managerial control that pervaded business schools at the time, and argued for the need to develop leadership practices aligned with inspiration, vision and innovation.
Through countless books, articles, and speakers on the subject since (Collins, Pozner and Kouzes, Maxwell, et al), the dichotomy of leadership versus management has grown stronger and, somewhat ironically, an inherent (and sometimes explicit) hierarchy of practices has formed. Indeed, Collins, in Good to Great, identifies managers as “level 3 leaders,” whereas there are two higher levels yet for those who practice traits of vision, humility, improvement and willpower.
Nonprofits, who traditionally have experienced greater difficulty in the basics of management to begin with, have leaped on to the leadership bandwagon with gusto, happily discarding the messy unpleasantness of “management;” in so doing, they jeopardize not only their organizations’ margins, but their entire missions as well. Many leaders in nonprofit aging services—executive directors, administrators, CEOs– actively campaign against “authoritative management,” citing their different “style of leadership” or “personality type” as their reasoning for glossing over the traditional facets of management. Leadership Institutes are now commonplace in trade organizations and professional societies, usually with a singular focus on leadership traits like vision and innovation and without regard to the duties and skills of a manager. In so doing, they throw out wholesale the lessons of the past and create real gaps in organizations’ abilities to actually effect the change they set out to create.
In 1990, John Kotter published an article entitled, “What Leaders Really Do.” The article’s first paragraph sums his entire thesis: “Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think… Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it. Rather, leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action.” In Kotter’s estimation, US businesses at the time were over-managed and underled. Unfortunately, the reality of aging services is that most organizations are both under-managed and underled, creating a disastrous combination that threatens their ability to survive.
Leadership is crucial, and we must continue to educate and train leaders in the practices that work. There is indeed still much work to do. Management, too, is critical to survival, however, and we must also stop vilifying the control of processes, the organizing of people, and the solving of business problems at the same time. As Kotter noted more than two decades ago, our success requires both.