By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy
Here’s an idea to differentiate your managing and leading skills. Reading time 3:57.

Take me to your leader. Remember those old science fiction movies you watched as a kid? Those invaders from outer space never said: Take me to your manager.”

Why? Managers focus on the NOW. Leaders focus on the NEW. As Peter Drucker famously noted that managers (NOW) do things right while leaders do the right (NEW) things.

In today’s ever-changing business environment proficient managing—good planning, budgeting, organizing and controlling- is necessary but no longer sufficient as John Kotter, the Harvard professor observed in his book The Leadership Factor. “One also needs good visions, strategies, coalitions and motivation to deal with competitively intense business environments.”

Indeed all leadership development begins with your intensive managing skills to cope with changing conditions. Then leaders get involved and they evolve their decision-making from a focus on changing conditions to conditioning change.

When you condition change, you adapt and adjust to the swirl of the world around you. And you evolve into a never-ending, always-engaging focus on continuous improvement. But it takes two to tango on the ever-changing dance floor of change.

You can’t be a good manager without FIRST being a good leader. And you can’t be a good leader without FIRST being a good manager.

Managing and Leading are two sides of the same coin—the coin all leaders need to polish on both sides -IN ORDER to consistently open the gate into the C-Suite for you and other developing leaders.

To help better define, differentiate and distinguish your progress from managing to leading, study the following 24 behavioral comparisons. They are rhymed to make a more significant deposit long-term in your memory bank.

Continue reading →