You Can’t Manage Your Way Through Change
A well-run company still has to change, and leadership has to go first.
It’s a Tuesday morning at a twelve-person service company. A scheduler has a question about a rush job. Three months ago, the owner hired a manager to handle exactly this kind of question, and he sits ten feet away. The scheduler walks past his desk, knocks on the owner’s door, and gets an answer in ten seconds. The owner is glad to help.
Nobody did anything wrong. That is the problem. The job description is written. The scheduling system is installed. The weekly meeting is on the calendar. And the authority never moved.
This is an invented story, but if you own a growing business, you may recognize it. This is the first article in a series on leadership and management in times of change. The point of this one is simple. When your business has to change, you have to lead it and manage it.
Leadership carries the most weight. Management is not optional.
The foundation: leadership and management
John Kotter, a well-known writer on organizational change, draws a clear line. Leadership moves people toward a changed future. Management brings order to complexity.
They are different jobs, and they work together. Kotter warns against strong leadership paired with weak management. He warns just as firmly against companies that are well managed and poorly led.
These are kinds of work, not kinds of people. In a company your size, you do both, often in the same hour.
So what: Instead of asking whether you are a leader or a manager, it helps to ask which of the two you have been giving less attention.
A well-run company still has to change
Back to our owner. Hers is a good business. Orders are filled, expenses are watched, and everyone knows their assignment. But she is the answer to every hard question, and it is wearing on her. So she hands scheduling and routine customer problems to a manager. She wants time to grow the company, and she wants a business that depends on more than one person.
That is organizational change: a meaningful shift in how a company operates, organizes responsibility, serves customers, or builds its abilities. It shows up differently in different companies. A young founder may have a business that outgrew the way it started. An established owner may be entering a new market or welcoming a new chief executive officer.
The pressure is the same. A company can run well today and still be poorly built for tomorrow.
One test helps with any change: what will people do differently, and what will the company do to make that possible?
So what: If you can’t answer that in plain words, the change isn’t ready to announce. A few minutes with that question now saves months of confusion later.
What leadership and management each contribute
In Kotter’s framework, leadership does three things. It sets direction, it lines people up behind that direction, and it keeps them moving when the road gets hard. Management does three different things. It plans and budgets, it organizes and staffs, and it monitors results and solves problems.
For our owner, the leadership work comes first. She has to explain why the company needs this change. She has to establish the manager’s standing with the team. And her own behavior has to back it up, which means letting the manager make decisions that are reasonable, even when they differ from the ones she would have made.
The management work then makes it workable. She defines what the manager can decide on scheduling, sets financial limits, says which customer exceptions he can handle, and decides when a problem comes back to her. The manager gets training, the right information, and a way to talk through hard calls.
A title doesn’t make anyone a leader, and people without senior titles can lead. The manager may need to lead this change with the team while still running the daily work.
So what: Both functions need to be present, and someone needs to own each one. If you can’t name who is carrying the leadership work in your company right now, that is worth settling first.
Why strong management alone is insufficient
Look again at what our owner did. She wrote a job description, installed a system, and set a weekly meeting. All of it was good management, and all of it was in place by the end of the first month.
None of it moved the scheduler’s feet. The scheduler still walks to the owner’s door, because that is what has always happened, and because now and then the owner reverses one of the manager’s decisions without a word. The scheduler isn’t being difficult. The scheduler is reading the room accurately.
This is the gap Kotter describes. Leading a change supplies what a schedule cannot: direction, energy, participation, and momentum. Managing a change controls disruption, cost, and problems. A project can look healthy on paper while the business stays the same, because finished tasks do not prove changed behavior.
Without leadership, a well-managed change stalls. Without management, a well-led change falls apart. But when a business is changing, leadership carries the heavier load.
So what: Here are three things that help, and you can start this week.
Explain the why. Before you assign a single task, tell your people what is changing, why it matters, and what stays the same.
Make decision rights clear. For each part of the change, say where someone’s authority starts and ends, and honor it, even when you would have chosen differently.
Check understanding, not just progress. Ask three people to tell you, in their own words, why this change is happening. If they can’t, you have found a leadership gap, and a better schedule won’t close it.
Leading a change is the harder work, and it is the work that makes a change last. If you are in the middle of one and could use help, contact Slark Consulting Group. We would be glad to talk it through with you.
