You’ve heard the term “born leader” — you know, a person who, from birth, has the innate personality and charisma to lead a team to greatness.
Here’s a little secret: That’s a myth.
Yes, some people are naturally better leaders than others. But it’s a common misconception that you’re either born into leadership or you’re not. Think of leadership like any other muscle; if you exercise and flex it, you’re going to get stronger and better at it. The same is true for great managers.
You will excel and succeed where you focus your time and energy, whether it’s:
- Leading your team to surpass sales goals and grow your portfolio; or
- Implementing new processes or systems as a manager to increase efficiency and improve the client experience.
So, overall, is it more beneficial for you to focus your resources and time on aiming to be a great leader or a great manager?
Both are needed among businesses in general, and certainly in the world of mortgage. Depending on the size of your organization, you might even be both a manager and a leader (yes, managers can be leaders and leaders can be managers).
Typically, though, people see better results when they focus their improvement efforts either one way or the other, so I recommend starting with a single focus — leader or manager.
What’s The Difference?
For starters, if you look in the Webster-Merriam dictionary, you’ll see managing something defined as “to handle or direct with a degree of skill.” Leadership, on the other hand, is “to guide someone or something along the way.”
What does that really mean? Imagine you’re a parent teaching your child to ride a bike or tie their shoes. Those key moments in their development are vital. That is managing, where you’re focused on the step-by-step process with measurable outcomes.
Leading is looking at the big picture. What are your family’s values? How do your children treat people? While these results are not necessarily measurable in the short term, guiding your child to be a good person is leadership.
“Once you learn more about yourself and your strengths, you will have a better idea of where you need to go to improve.”
The same is true in business. Strong performance over time may indicate that the organization has strong leadership. You can tell if a team has a solid management structure by how well it succeeds at day-to-day tasks and processes.
One of the simplest ways to describe the difference is through a quote by Peter Drucker, who’s considered the “father of modern management”: “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
Why Are Both Needed?
There is a clear difference between guiding your organization to long-term success and managing the day-to-day processes and tasks that will get you there. Both are equally important.
Imagine a room full of managers who are consistently executing at a high level. Sounds nice, right? But imagine those managers are leading a modern-day smartphone factory team that perfectly assembles 100,000 rotary or land-line phones. Yes, they could be seen as having met a day-to-day goal, but it doesn’t help you as an organization.
You need someone keeping the work aligned with your overall strategy — a leader.
Now picture a team full of leaders, high on vision but low on execution, and that’s where management comes in. A good friend of mine recently installed several large pieces of patio furniture, and we quickly realized our group of four dads working on it might be too many for one 20x20-ft. “construction site.”
You need someone who oversees individual tasks with expertise — a manager — and people capable of pulling things across the finish line.
What’s Your Focus?
Whether you’re happy where you’re at or want to seek bigger opportunities, it always pays to continuously try to improve. If you want to add more value to your management or leadership skills, start by determining where you want to focus your time and effort to get better.
Identify areas for growth within your skillset. Learn more about yourself. There are numerous self-assessment tools available to dive in. A couple of options include Meyers-Briggs, Gallup, DISC, and emotional intelligence assessments. Once you learn more about yourself and your strengths (and shortfalls), you’ll have a better idea of where you need to go to improve.
“Be ready and open to receiving feedback if you ask for it ... it all leads toward making yourself more skilled, effective, and valuable.”
Don’t be afraid to ask your colleagues, other managers, or those you partner with what they feel would be most useful for you to spend your time on. That’s the same line of thinking that has made 360-degree reviews so effective.
Other people have a way of seeing us more clearly and objectively than we see ourselves from our inner perspectives. Just be ready and open to receiving feedback if you ask for it. It may make you uncomfortable at first, but it all leads toward making yourself more skilled, effective, and valuable.
“It’s perfectly ok to work on an area or trait where you’re already good in an effort to become great.”
Improving an area of strength can sometimes be accomplished more quickly and pay better dividends than trying to shore up a weakness. It’s perfectly ok to work on an area or trait where you’re already good in an effort to become great.
Whatever you decide to focus on will likely define your early development opportunities. Next, you’ll need to find actual opportunities where you can field test new management or leadership approaches.
Areas Of Opportunity: Management
I’ve worked on several teams where we identified inefficiencies in our workflows. Sometimes multiple people were doing the same job, our processes had outdated requirements, or the chain of custody for certain tasks was redundant.
On one of my most successful teams, our manager held a half-day onsite team meeting and asked us to break down every major internal process we had by defining each contributing step as a preference, tradition, or requirement.
In other words, were we doing something just because we liked to do it that way, or were we actually required to, at a minimum, to create value for our organization and partners?
This is not only a great exercise in management, but it can help you discover a stream of other opportunities for managerial enhancement while engaging your team in a collaborative way — and giving them ownership of the outcomes.
Areas Of Opportunity: Leadership
While some consider performance reviews a simple managerial task, I do not. While, admittedly, I once had a manager at a previous company I worked for surprise me with a write-up in an annual review for a problem I was entirely unaware of, I’ve also had some of the most enjoyable and meaningful conversations of my entire career during performance reviews.
To me, performance reviews should be a conversation where you choose to lead by embracing the opportunity to collaborate with your employees on how you view their performance and what you see as future growth opportunities. It’s important to illuminate situations where your team can find new ways to create value for the organization and, by extension, themselves.
View these types of situations as opportunities to share your vision and win support — the nuts and bolts of leadership.
You’re not there to fix their self-image or instantly solve a problem, you are recapping past performance and using that as a basis for the projection of expected work efforts. You’re thinking long-term and, hopefully, helping steer them away from less important tasks and wasteful work. To quote renowned American academic and economist Michael Porter, sometimes “strategy is choosing what not to do.”
Key Takeaways
You must stay true to yourself and your work. Why put in the hard hours of honing your leadership skills if you’re not truly interested in leading groups of people?
Alternatively, does it actually make sense to focus on managerial enhancements when your team has experience and a well-defined process, and exceeds current performance expectations?
Focus on areas that “live at the crossroads” of high impact for your team or organization, while also staying true to what’s important to you and your future goals. As with most things in business (and perhaps life itself), knowing yourself goes a long way. Focus on what matters most to you and find opportunities, sometimes disguised as challenges, that support your vision.
If you want to take action, I challenge you to put time on your calendar now, so you don’t simply put it off and forget. You don’t want to find yourself shipping those rotary phones you never meant to assemble in the first place.
