What Is The Difference Between Manager And Leader

There's a lot of debate about whether leaders are somehow better than managers, or if managers are better than leaders. But to make employees great, to truly leverage employee performance and engagement, you actually need the correct balance of both the external forces of management and the internal forces of leadership.

In one of our recent studies, we matched the data from the employee engagement surveys and performance appraisals in 207 organizations. To the best of our knowledge, we're the first ones to do this, and one thing we were looking for were anomalous conditions; the unexpected. And from the magnitude of the media storm created by our study release (everyone from NPR to Rush Limbaugh picked it up), boy did we find it. In a nutshell, our study showed that:

* In 42% of the organizations studied, employees receiving "low performer" performance-appraisal ratings scored higher than "high performers" on the engagement survey questions: "I am motivated to give 100% effort at work" and "I recommend this organization as a great place to work."

In other words, there are a lot of low performers reporting to be more motivated than their high performing peers, and who claim to be enjoying their work more than their high performing peers.

IS THIS A MANAGEMENT ISSUE OR A LEADERSHIP ISSUE?

These findings represent a big problem, but is it a management issue or a leadership issue? The answer is, it's both. Leadership IQ researchers were able to identify some of the reasons why so many great employees feel so demotivated at work. And two of the big factors responsible are:

* Dissatisfaction with employee performance recognition and reward, and

* Feeling little to no personal control over career trajectory.

Now, management is extrinsic; it's all about observing the behavioral actions employees take and motivating with external punishment and rewards that incent employees to higher performance. Leadership, on the other hand, focuses on the intrinsic. It's not about giving employees a reward for doing a good thing, or a punishment for a bad thing. But rather, leadership is about getting employees to want to do that good thing; to want to take control of their own careers and their own futures by creating greatness for the organization and for themselves.

HUNDRED PERCENTER PERFORMANCE REQUIRES BOTH EXTRINSIC MANAGEMENT AND INTRINSIC LEADERSHIP

Creating a Hundred-Percenter workplace requires a delicate balance of leveraging the formal authority and power of management while challenging your people in psychologically smart ways to help them realize their full potential and to take control of their own futures within the organization. This will be the focus of our upcoming live webinar: Are You a Manager or a Leader? We'll start by debunking a lot of the traditional management and leadership measures many organizations still use, and then learn some great new tools like the 3-ways that 100% Leaders challenge their employees to achieve more without burning them out, and some rules for soliciting feedback from employees, and listening to that feedback, in a way that supercharges both your management and leadership skills.

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