In the current pop-business wisdom, managers are bad, but leaders are good. If you want a lot of likes on social media, post a meme or a listicle using that theme. It's an understandable, but foolish impulse. We've all had bad bosses who make the memes relatable, but the problem isn't that those bosses were doing management and not doing leadership - it's that they weren't doing leadership well. They probably weren't doing management well either.

As best I can tell, the notion that management and leadership are at odds really got going with Abraham Zeleznik's article Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?, which was published in 1977. If you're interested, you can read a reprint of it over at the HBR site. To understand where Zeleznik was coming from, let's take a brief tour through history.

Leadership has been around essentially forever. The oldest book on leadership in the corpus of Western literature is Xenophon's Cyropaedia (The Education of Cyrus in English). In it, Xenophon, a student of Socrates, investigates what it was that made Cyrus an effective leader in pulling together an empire that for 50 years would be a constant threat to the Greek city-states. Peter Drucker went so far as to say, "The first book on Leadership, Cyropaedia, is still the best¹."

In contrast, management as we know it is barely 100 years old. Before that, if you had looked up the word management, the definitions would have focused on managing a household or a farm. Through one of those interesting historical coincidences, one of our oldest books on management, the Oikonomikos, was also written by Xenophon. It mostly concerns the right dividing up of the work of the estate between husband and wife, supervision of hired workers and slaves, and so on. In the early 1900s, Frederick Winslow Taylor, a mechanical engineer by trade, published a paper, Shop Management, and soon after a book, Principles of Scientific Management, in which he advocated for applying scientific principles to the analysis and organization of work. And so was born both management and management consulting.

Taylor's goal was noble. He believed that proper organization of work could simultaneously decrease the cost of labor and increase the wages of the workers. The other fathers of modern management followed close on his heels. Henry Gantt's approach to task scheduling gave us the Gantt chart. Frank Gilbreth gave us time-and-motion studies. All of the early contributors to scientific management literature were engineers. That background, coupled with the fact that they largely confined their studies to relatively unskilled manual labor shaped scientific management toward a mechanistic view of work and worker.

Fast forward to the late 1930s and the behaviorist psychology enters the picture. In the behaviorist view, man does not differ fundamentally from any other animal. The interior workings of the mind are either dismissed because of their unobservability or treated as just another form of behavior that can be conditioned with reward and punishment. Combine scientific management and behaviorism, and you end up with a compelling justification to treat the human workers as just another machine to be optimized and operated. If the human worker is not a machine, we should find it unsurprising if he objects to this approach. In fact, the human worker objected so strongly that from the 1940s through the 1970s, there were hundreds of strikes and lockouts every year².

In 1960, Douglas McGregor wrote The Human Side of Motivation, in which he described two views of human motivation. McGregor believed that the dominant view of employee motivation at the time, which he labeled Theory X, rested on five pillars. The average worker:

• Dislikes work and attempts to avoid it
• Has no ambition, wants no responsibility, and would rather follow than lead.
• Is self-centered and therefore does not care about organizational goals.
• Resists change.
• Is gullible and not particularly intelligent³.
  

Consequently, management attempted to drive the behavior of employees through reward and punishment. If McGregor was correct in his diagnosis of the prevailing sentiment, one can readily see how Zeleznik would conclude that management is all about getting the job done practically and unimaginatively. He says that in dealing with other people, managers either negotiate and bargain, or they use rewards, punishments and other forms of coercion. Theory X, anyone? Leaders, on the other hand, are risk-seeking, adventurous, and rely on emotional connection. Further, he assumes, without evidence, that managers and leaders are two distinct personality types.

Frankly, I don't want to be a "manager" OR a "leader" in Zeleznik's false dichotomy. I don't really want to work for either of them either. If the choice is stifling and objectively manipulative vs. chaotic and emotionally manipulative, I'll choose, "No thanks, not today."

What if we view management and leadership are complementary skills, not competing worldviews? Then they become tools that can be developed and applied as needed to make work both productive and rewarding for the worker and the organization. In an upcoming post, I'll unpack this a little more.