What is the difference between “leadership” and “management”?
This past Wednesday night, over 50 CEOs and Founders from across the Trinity Ventures portfolio gathered together for our annual CEO and Founder dinner to debate this question. Imbued by energized networking and copious cocktails, we explored and debated the fundamentals of leadership and management in difficult times, since, especially in this economic environment, world class leadership and management skills are crucial to the success and growth of a business. While our portfolio company leaders represent an extremely seasoned and high caliber group of executives, all enjoyed revisiting and reflecting on these fundamental values. I thought it worth summarizing the key examples and takeaways as I found it a good fit with the spirit of IronGiving.
The discussion topic, Leadership in Difficult Times, was facilitated and led by our guest speaker, Professor Charles O’Reilly from the Stanford Business School. Professor O’Reilly’s discussion included aggressive Socratic style cold calling of the audience (after all, he is a business school professor) and spirited debate. We examined three real world scenarios brought to life via video clip interviews with three high tech CEOs: Bill Campbell, former CEO of Intuit, current Chairman who covered a situation where his authority as a CEO was openly challenged, Kent Thiry, CEO of DaVita who covered an instance where a high performer on his team clashed with the existing company culture (be sure to click on his name to watch the YouTube video and get a flavor for his colorful leadership style) and Brian NeSmith, CEO of Blue Coat Systems who covered a scenario where an engineering rock star was disrupting productivity.
The most succinct answer to the above question came from Brett Wilson, CEO and cofounder of TubeMogul, an online video analytics and advertising startup Trinity invested in earlier this year. Brett stated emphatically, “Leadership is about inspiring the team to win the game, and management is about the x’s and o’s of how to win”. I couldn’t agree more and as a former crew team guy, I thought the image above captured this mixture well - inspired team members can pull hard on the oar but they also need to do so in unison and with rhythm.
I won’t go into the details of each scenario but the high level takeaways include:
- CEOs need to embody BOTH leadership and management to be effective. This was the simplest yet biggest lesson. The best CEOs do both. It isn’t easy, but the rewards and returns are even greater for those who can.
- CEOs are signal generators. What they do and say ripples across an organization in unspoken and obvious ways faster than you think. Be aware and cognizant of your actions at all times.
- Firing someone is hard, but not acting quickly and decisively to address performance and/or culture fit problems is usually even more damaging to the company and other people involved.
I’ll try and get the full set of slides that Professor O’Reilly went through and post them here as I think they are useful for any reader to take a quick look at, stay tuned for those. In the meantime, I welcome any comments or examples of great leaders who balance both leadership and management.
Update – here are the slides from Professor O’Reilly. They don’t contain the embedded video interviews we went through during the dinner but it should give you a good sense of the material covered and ideas discussed, enjoy —
Jim,
Excellent post, thanks for sharing. Certainly the CEO is critical and one should balance leadership and management, and yes it is tricky as you say. That said, leadership takes different forms, and there are instances where leadership and management are mutually exclusive (aside from the CEO role).
‘Barbarians to Bureaucrats’ depicts this well, as I am sure, so do other books. It’s an art as it is experiential, on how a CEO balances the tug and pull of leadership desires from within the team. After all when one is ‘inspiring the team to win’ one is also inspiring some to become leaders.
Shail
Good point Shail, great leaders are teaching at the same time and growing the next generation of leaders. Check out the slides from Professor O’Reilly, he makes this same point as well toward the end.
Excellent post, Jim. The Davita video is inspiring. Wow. One question I ponder some times is how does the ratio of required leadership : management from a CEO vary depending on company size / stage. From my limited experience, in smaller companies, CEOs have to be leaders AND managers (and pretty active at that) given the tenuousness of the venture and the rapid change inherent in any small company.
Agreed, that was a key takeaway from the evening event – balancing the right mix of management vs. leadership is critical but very tricky.
A few glasses of wine and the wisdom begins to flow
. Thanks to Jim and his colleagues as it was an enjoyable event and the attendees were first class.
Thx Brett, the credit goes especially to Patricia and Noel for spearheading the event.
Great quote by Brett. It drives the point succintly and most effectively. plain awesomeness!
Jim, thanks for posting the insights of real-world discussions. Good info.
I agree with Brett about “winning the game” to define the leadership. Failure can be also defined as success but winning is not…
-Uday.
Thx Uday, glad you found the info useful. Can you elaborate on your last point “Failure can be also defined as success but winning is not…”?
Jim,
It’s little tricky to explain my statement w/o quoting examples and hope, i don’t offend any one.
[1] HP e-speak project
It’s a failed one. It’s dead now. But including myself say that this project is success because it enabled the Webservices or SOA paradigm in distributed computing.
http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-150.html
(failed but success)
[2]VMware
It may be surprising now to hear that it got rejected by some investors in the beginning but look at the result- it created an industry today.
(winning the game)
Ah, now I see what you meant. And I totally agree. Silicon Valley and tech industry in general is littered with examples of innovations that were too early, just slightly off or just faced too much competition at that point in history such that they never quite become an enduring commercial success, yet paved the way for future winners around the same concepts or technologies. Napster comes to mind for me and how it paved the way for the amazingly successful iPod and Apple resurgence.
I love Brett’s quote:
“Leadership is about inspiring the team to win the game, and management is about the x’s and o’s of how to win.”
Agreed! Shoot me an email if you want an intro to Brett, he’s a great guy to know and network with in the startup ecosystem.