Training for your leadership is usually a sizable piece of any company’s training budget. Nobody is arguing that managers don’t benefit from training. It’s the “management vs leadership” debate where we hear various arguments about what is the best value. The main thing to consider as you determine how to invest is how well your management development training program aligns with your leadership development goals.

Management and Leadership Differences

Leading and managing are both roles that an individual business leader who has a management responsibility must play. They are NOT the same, but are both important and complementary roles.

Management roles are generally about giving direction, getting structures and controls in place to make sure that specific deliverables are met, etc.  Leadership is about vision and inspiring the team to play at a higher level.

Both leading and managing skill sets are important. Managing skills include things like delegating, reviewing progress, assigning work, scheduling, setting priorities and communicating.

Leadership skills essentially mold how that work is accomplished. Some of the leadership skills are stylistic or personality based. Some of those require a higher level of conscious awareness both of yourself as the business leader, and of the other people on your team.

To illustrate, some people are really good at the tactical managing requirements in order to get stuff done. These same people, however, might fail to recognize (or choose to ignore) people’s differences in styles, preferences, passions, or strengths. Because they neglect to recognize these, they fail to optimize what their team is capable of achieving. They still get the job done through their management skill but they may create a level of performance that is artificially capped and not come close to the true potential of the team because they lack some of the leadership traits required to pull that off.

A Leadership Model that Really Works

The model that we use at Win Enterprises is called Conscious Leadership. Conscious Leadership has two major sections: Conscious of Self and Conscious of Others.  Each section contains four leadership attributes.

Leaders with Conscious of Self attributes:

  • Are centered and grounded
  • Have clarity in their life
  • Are self aware
  • Are introspective and curious

Leaders with Conscious of Others attributes:

  • Are humble
  • Are trustworthy
  • Act equally as coaches, mentors, and students
  • Are engaged with and committed to developing teams

A leadership development program designed around the Conscious Leadership model would start with the Conscious of Self attributes.  As a leader when you improve your ability to lead yourself by practicing these Conscious of Self attributes, you build a foundation for leading other people.  You can then develop the Conscious of Other attributes.

It is within this context that you can consider different management and leadership strategies, as the leaders in your organization will now have a better awareness of which is more appropriate in the different situations.

Integrate both!

Your management training exercises should definitely teach managers and supervisors the mechanics of the management skills mentioned above.   The management skills can be trained and discussed within the leadership responsibilities and become critical tools in the toolbox for any leader.  This way your business leaders who have management responsibility can learn to be effective at their management roles while developing their leadership skills.