8

"A good manager does things right. A leader does the right things."

--Warren Bennis


This distinction has been guiding my thinking for half a year. It's one of those simple little phrases that explodes your thinking. It explains how you can be surrounded by gifted, talented people and yet feel frustrated by a lack of growth or vision or momentum. When I was working at another school, twenty years ago, I was frustrated by the immutable structure of the place. No matter what happened, there as one thing that was dead certain, and that was that the school's structures would remain unchanged. I met hundreds of students with interesting situations and together we forged great, creative ideas and suggestions. But rare was the idea or question that could move forward or inch toward reality. Institutions and structures sometimes ossify due to inflexibility, an inablity to loosen up, to reinvent oneself.

There's a necessary and critical tension in education: you need a stable structure to build on, yet you need the ability to question, reinvent, reimagine, reformulate, reconceptualize, reenvision. You need revolution. You need iconoclasts and icons. Ideas do change. Paradigms shift. Look at the impact of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Gutenberg, Martin Luther, Newton, Freud, Darwin, Martin Luther King, Einstein.... An admittedly SHORT list. Fractures in order do happen. Each one seems an apocalypse. At least to most, to those who are most embedded to the established order. And that is to be understood.

But I suddenly realized this morning that perhaps not everyone who is in a position to be a leader or transform themselves into a leader wants to be a leader.

Maybe they like being a manager!

As a friend of mine once said, change is messy. The comment reveals much about the weight of the cherished value: order! But learning is messy!

Maybe they want to be leaders. I had never thought of that!

Maybe they don't want to be leaders for a number of reasons. They don't know how. They are shy about leadership. They resist the mantle of leadership because it carries too heavy of a burden or responsibility. Fear. Inadequacy. They sense a lack of support. They feel unprepared. They may feel that they already are a leader, and so when the distinction or suggestion that they are not keeps arising they feel insulted, angered, or devalued. The reasons may be multiple. Fear.

Managing is not leading.

Managing should be valued. But not overly valued. It is fundamental. It is not visionary. It is critical and vital. But one can't live and thrive with management only. Something more is needed.

But we create structures in which we confuse the two, or in which one critical function supercedes the other need.

Managing is about control. Leadership is about trust.

We need to be comfortable distinguishing the two and not be afraid to value both and not confuse one for the other. To do so is to ensure an impenetrable status quo.