Leadership & Management Working Together
Both Are Essential
- Management handles complexity: systems, structure, and order
- Leadership handles change: vision, growth, and movement
Without management, we get chaos.
Without leadership, we get stagnation.
We need both.
The Church Is at War
- In peace, you can survive with mostly management
- In war, you need leaders at every level
- The church is in a spiritual war — so we must lead well
“You can manage people into routine. You must lead them into battle.”
Not Competition, But Complement
- Leaders need managers to get things done
- Managers need leaders to know where to go
- One is not better than the other
- They must work as a team, not compete
Beware the Stereotypes
Leadership isn’t always glamorous.
Management isn’t boring or easy.
Both are biblical, necessary, and powerful.
Balance Is Crucial
- Most churches are over-managed and under-led
- But leadership without good management can be even worse
- Vision without structure leads to disruption and disorganisation
Know Yourself
- Understand your strengths and weaknesses
- Focus on your strengths
- Build a team to cover your weak spots — don’t just hire people like you
- Leader-managers (those who do both well) are especially valuable
Three essential roles in the organisation:
| |
|---|
| Vision |
| Strategy |
| Tactical details |
Together, they keep the big picture connected to the daily reality.
In short:
Leadership and management are like two wings on the same bird — without both, we cannot fly.
Management is about coping with complexity. Without good management, complex organisations – as today’s churches and Christian organisations have become – tend to degenerate into chaos in ways that threaten their very existence. Good management brings order and consistency to the overall flow of life and activity in the organisation. Consequently, we must have good management!
Leadership, on the other hand, is about coping with change – and a church or Christian organisation that is truly alive in the purposes of God will be constantly growing and maturing, and therefore changing.
In a military analogy, a peacetime army can usually survive with good management and administration throughout the organisation, coupled with a few good leaders right at the very top. An army that is at war, however, needs competent leadership at every level. No one has yet determined how to manage people effectively into battle; they must be led! The church is in a continual war. Consequently, we must have good leadership!
Leaders establish the right and powerful vision of the future. Managers keep things going smoothly while we are getting there. Leaders need managers or else they will never get where they want to go, and managers need leaders or else they will often not know where to go. Therefore, one is not superior to the other.
They should complement one another and not compete.
Today’s managers have been done a great disservice by contemporary leadership literature that implies or states:
- Leadership is cool, glamorous, mysterious and exotic, while management is boring, mundane and tedious.
- Leadership is the province of a chosen few who possess “charisma” or other mystical personality traits, while managers are “a dime-a-dozen.”
- Leadership changes the world, but management is just like rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic.
In reality, we must have both leaders and managers or else we will fail.
Managers sometimes accuse leaders of being “out of touch” or “out of control” or “living in a dream world,” and leaders sometimes accuse managers of “going nowhere” and “wasting everyone’s time and energy with trifling details,” but they need each other.
Leaders and managers must learn to work together as a team, with each contributing their unique perspectives and strengths.
While most churches are over-managed and under-led, it should be remembered that strong leadership with weak management is no better, and is sometimes worse, than the reverse. Some people who are very strong in leadership abilities such as change, innovation and vision-casting, lack the ability or desire to focus on tasks related to effective management. Preferring “big picture” activities to routine work, they may invest little of their time and attention in designing effective systems of administration, establishing standards, policies and procedures, or structuring roles and responsibilities. In addition, their informal, impulsive style may frequently disrupt the ongoing, legitimate activities of the organisation.
The real challenge is to combine strong leadership and strong management and allow each to balance the other. Effective top leadership teams understand and value both kinds of people and work hard to make each of them an integral part of the team. Otherwise, chaos will result in the loosely-structured organisation commonly associated with the strong leader.
Very few people are entirely one or the other.
You should understand your strengths and weaknesses. Then you should function primarily according to your strengths while working to strengthen your weaknesses.
Additionally, you should populate your team according to your weaknesses. Some leaders make the terrible mistake of staffing their team with people who are just like themselves. The wise leader will surround himself with people whose strengths make up for his own weaknesses.
People with a “leader-manager” orientation are able to function well in both worlds.
It is obviously important that all three ovals receive attention: we need a vision, a strategy and tactical details to be provided by leaders, leader-managers and managers respectively.
- Leaders provide vision.
- Leader-managers provide strategy.
- Managers provide tactical details.
Moreover, an effective leader-manager is able to produce powerful synergies between the two roles. In balancing the big picture and long-term vision with the demands of the present operations, the leader-manager is able to maintain order.
Then the leader-manager works with both the development of people and the needs of the organisation so that effective decisions regarding alignment can be made.
By both inspiring and directing people, the leader-manager contributes to the organisation’s success.
Finally, through his personal make-up that balances flexibility and an ability to work with ambiguity on the one hand and managerial clarity on the other, the leader-manager is able to bring unity to the organisation, building bridges between the visionaries and the administrators ‒ the big picture and the fine details.