202602160957 Managers tell you where you are and leaders tell you where you're going

A manager’s job is to tell you where you are, and a leader’s job is to tell you where you're going.¹

202104291524 Execution is the priority of team management, so managers should be highly concerned with the performance of their teams. In order to 202203241152 Ask for more from your people, they need to know how everyone is doing now. In an organization, there's no other role whose responsibility it is to understand on an individual level how each person is doing and coach them to learn and grow (202104291947 Our purpose as leaders is to serve others, 202110181205 Invest discretionary time in top performers, 202110181158 Coaching underperformers).

Similarly, managers should know where the team is today, what they're working on, how it's going, and how they can be used tactically in the context of the company. These concerns are all mapping out "where we are".

Conversely, leaders (in the narrow definition of the Rands quote) should be primarily concerned with 202203231647 Leading from vision and 202203231646 Affecting long-term change. They are not tracking individual performance or coaching people effectively. They are pushing for the strategic direction and assuming that other people will sort out the details.

An easier way to understand the difference is that leaders are stronger at strategy and managers are stronger at operations. When do you need which? Depends an an endless set of factors, including team size, their place on the organization chart, company culture, and many more.¹

While it's possible for a great manager to have skills in both of these areas, it's more likely that they will prefer, lean, or be more skilled in one or the other.