Good Management is Good Leadership

Stop poo pooing "management"- "bold" leadership has its limits

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Photo by Eden Constantino on Unsplash

Today was the first day I began to suspect spring was around the corner. As someone who has experienced her share of April 1 snowstorms, I remain cautious but the windflowers are poking up their little heads and the ducks are back on the salt marsh. :Let’s all be hopeful, shall we?

Over the past few weeks, a few of my pet peeves intersected in the current “vibe” if that’s what we can call it. One is the persistent idea that “management” is somehow a grubby, undignified relative of noble “leadership.” This article from the Harvard Business Review sums up my overall point of view - that the best managers are leaders and vice versa. (I pretty much stole my title from the title of this article, so I am owning up to it!) I blame the ubiquitous and quotable Simon Sinek for the enduring wave of our turning noses up at mere management. Maybe SS is old news some places, but I think he’s pretty durable in independent school circles.

(And as a side note - I don’t have a beef with Simon Sinek’s work - I heard him speak at NAIS a few years ago; I watched the “Start with Why” TedX talk like everyone else when it was a thing and it’s certainly food for thought - but who is this guy? His bio and his wikipedia pages are very… thin. He’s not a founder, other than for his own motivational speaking and writing company. He has a degree in cultural anthropology. He started out in advertising. I’m not sure he ever led or managed anyone? Am I the only one who goes hmmmm about such things or should I just cut and paste his pithy sayings and go about my business? Is this a “me” thing.)

The other pet peeve is that terrible leadership and management practices are excused as being “like real business” or “this happens in the private sector every day.”

There is bad leadership and bad management in the private sector and there is bad leadership and bad management in not for profits. If I never hear “move fast and break things” again, I’m OK with that. That came from Facebook, which was a startup in the newborn sector of social media, where there wasn’t a whole lot to break and the boom and bust cycle of tech companies was part of the fabric of Silicon Valley. Remember Pets.Com? Yeah. The concept of “disruption” has been romanticized to such a degree few people have paused to examine whether or not it’s a phenomenon that leaves us better off - and I refer you to an oldie but a goodie, Jill Lepore’s examination of Clayton Christensen’s gospel of disruption in the New Yorker, 2014. (I can’t figure out how to send this as a gift link! Account required but I think you can read it for free. It’s a long one.)

And let’s be honest - both of these trends aren’t solely related to our current presidential administration. I feel as if conversations about leadership in independent schools are rife with the sense that management is for small thinking, cautious types and leadership is for bold visionaries.

Being a bold visionary is fun! It’s fun to make choices like having your office walls