Hey, it's Samantha Hartley with a Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. We are in, believe it or not, season eight. This is season eight. Welcome. It is about consulting ideas, and the idea that I wanted to talk to you about today is the difference between or the commonalities in leadership and management. Like, What are we being leaders and when do we need to manage things?

I thought it was a fascinating topic because I have this come up a lot with clients who have a gap in this area. And so I wanted to share that with you because I really think it can be very liberating when you realize what you have covered and where you have opportunities.

So I first started thinking seriously about leadership as a self-employed person, probably about 10 years ago. I'd been in business already for 10 years. So, you know, I kind of had a relationship to leading things, but I was really leading myself and I had a coach approach me to coach me in leadership, and I was like, I don't really need help on that because I'm like leading like three, 10 team members. It's not that much effort. So I kind of shut that down, but it didn't start me thinking like, in what ways am I a leader and who am I leading?

So a leader kind of implies that there are followers. And whether you kind of recruit them yourself, like with clients or whether you build an audience and you have people who follow you, that is kind of going to be leadership, right? So I realized that it is important to me to be a leader. And I do want to lead my team and I love leading my clients, and I think I take responsible actions for doing that. I mean, it's important to me to show up in a certain way. And I definitely, you know, I acknowledge that I'm trying at least to be a thought leader and hopefully bringing you, my listeners, ideas that you haven't heard before or things that you need to hear in a certain way or, you know, things that are particularly relevant to you. So those are all the ways that I'm acknowledging now. Like, I feel like, Oh, OK, that's the leadership, then where is management in our lives and where are we having to manage and who are we having to manage? So that, to me, seems to be an important distinction for my clients.

So I would love for you to think for a moment. What does it mean for you to be a leader? Do you feel yourself a leader or do you feel like I once did that? I was like, Oh, I'm kind of far from that word. Do you feel you're a leader? And in what ways do you feel that you are a leader and of whom? Who are you leading?

I think there are interesting questions to ask, and I'm curious as to what comes up for you when you ask those, I think is important is that, like leadership brings responsibility with it, right? So if we're leading people, they're looking to us and it's like, we kind of need to have our act together about the things that we're leading. And so what does it really mean to be a leader? Well, I was curious since I've been kind of over the last few weeks what I've been thinking about this topic for you. I've been kind of like just looking at what other people are saying about leadership and things like that. We all seem to agree that a leader has a vision of where we're taking this whole thing and that holding that vision, and I think thinking about that vision is actually really critical and important.

Do you have a vision for your business and for your work? It's probably very closely aligned with your why? Like, why did I ever start doing this? What do I want to have happen in the world and how will I know when that is happening? So usually a vision is the vision of success, like when this thing is working, here's what will be true, and I think that's what leaders hold is that vision. I've always described leadership as like, figure out where we're going, make our path to get us there and then get everything out of the way like remove obstacles. And I think while that's pretty accurate, I think there's a couple more steps to it. So certainly that vision.

And the second thing is having that clear path like setting a path in motion, like, here's the way we're going to get there. That to me is a leader's job is to say you want to double your business. Here's the path to getting there. Or, you know, you want to have you want to retain this top talent. Well, here's the way you're going to be able to do that. So setting that path in motion for ourselves, our own businesses and for our clients. I think that's the next key piece of that. If that's the vision, here's where we're going to go to get there.

And then clearing obstacles along the way. This, to me, has been always like one of the most important things that a leader can do. And I know when I worked in a company and there I would encounter obstacles, I would always look around and be like, Can somebody like, Why don't I have this? So sometimes it would be like, we don't have the budget or we're not equipped, we don't have those skills. And a lot of times it would be like external obstacles, like political things like a person in the company doesn't want us to do that. And so they would be blocking our access to resources or they would be not showing up for the meetings or something dumb like that. So whatever it is that an obstacle looks like, part of leadership to me is to get those obstacles out of the way. So if we take a moment and consider like, where do you have obstacles coming up for yourself as you're pursuing the path to your vision? And then do you have team members who come to you and say, I can't get X done because or maybe your clients will say that like, I understand that I'm supposed to be going there and that this is the path, but this is on my way. So I don't know how to do something or it's been difficult for me to do this or whatever is in the way. And I think clearing obstacles is key.

The last piece of this to me is reinvigorating as needed. So we have to there's a certain amount of rah rah that leaders need to do. The removing obstacles, sometimes the obstacle is like a bad mood or, you know, bad attitude or something that is really blocking people from getting in there and being able to proceed.

So those are the things that I think the leader does, and I didn't include creating a team for things because a lot of times sometimes a team is just someone who follows you, right? So the leader is leading and then they turn around and there's these people who are following them. Sometimes your audience will build in that same way. You also might have somebody else who puts the team together for you because I don't necessarily think that those are obligatory skills. I don't necessarily think that a leader has to be amazing at like hiring or recruiting team members. If big movies tell us anything, sometimes you inherit this like ragtag band of, you know, whoever's who are going to, you know, you bring them together. They become the A-Team, and then you're going to go to solve crimes with them. In this case, I think sometimes you have your own team, sometimes you bring on a team, you hire a ready made team and sometimes you find somebody on your team and then they populate the team with other people they know. So I don't think that being able to be amazing at hiring or amazing at knowing exactly who should fill the roles is necessarily a leader's job. I think knowing what roles you need and how to get towards the vision is.

So I've talked a lot about that, about what a leader is because I want to now talk about a manager and I'm bringing this up because I have a number of clients who come to me and the situation will be something like, you know, I have these like five people on my team. And by the, you know, by the time I delegate something, it takes me a really long time and then handling things over here and following up on deadlines, and I'm having to review all the work. So having a team at a certain point for them has become, you know, almost more onerous than it is removing obstacles from themselves. So the team managing the team is beginning to take up a disproportionate amount of time relative to the value of the team. So I do see that with some of my clients and I see it, especially with people who are doing done-for-you-services or who are thinking about that and bringing in more service providers. And you may just even run into this if you work for a while with a web team or somebody else who is on a particular project.

Managing is a totally different skill set, I think from leadership. And a lot of us assume because we're leaders or a lot of us end up as leaders and then are expected to manage something we feel like we can do that job, and I would say about this one. There's actually something to know here. And not everybody is going to be good at it. What's funny is in some of the research I did, leadership is like exalted and like management is like, you know, in the dirt doing the details kind of thing like this. And actually, I don't think being a leader is more virtuous or amazing than being a manager because without managers, nothing gets done. And not every leader is a “getter doner”. Not everyone who is leading teams can get back in there and dig in and help them to get things done. So managers are those who have a goal and then construct the constraints like they bring everything together. Then they manage that team or the resources in achievement of that goal. And, you know, usually there's an on time on budget and, you know, with as little death and destruction as possible kind of a caveat that goes in there.

So you've got to have either management skills on your team or a manager on your team. That's the key piece that's missing for a lot of my clients when they first come to me. They'll be like my team is growing and now I'm nuts and things are not good for me working in the business. And I'll be like, Who's on your team? And they'll tell me, and I'll be like, Who's managing that team? And they'll say, me. And that is when things turn into a problem. It is perhaps counterintuitive to think that you needed to bring in somebody to manage that team. In some cases, this isn't right for everybody. In some cases, you're going to need to have somebody on the team who does the managing.

Nowadays, we have a lot of popular terms for this. So COO was the first name that came to me back in the day when I hired for this position. I was thinking, what I actually need is a CEO who can run the business while I'm doing my thing. So that was close to what I wanted. You can also call this project manager. First Lieutenant is another of the kind of the terms that I was thinking of, you know, what I need is like a right hand person or a lieutenant. All of those kind of like the person behind the person, were the ideas that came to me. Again, nowadays we call this OBM, project manager, integrator, there's a lot of language, Chief of Staff, there's a lot of language, which implies what this role does. So if you don't have this role in your business, then you need to spend some of your time doing this role and it may drive you crazy.

A lot of the things that make leaders and entrepreneurs and consultants good at what they do is big picture thinking and then the personality to be able to attract clients to you on a consistent basis. And then a certain amount of creativity. So even in the most seemingly uncreative specialties, there's going to be a lot of creativity within that. Just one example. I always thought that like finance was like black and white. It's just numbers. And then I had a mentor who told me, no finance is actually very creative. And I have met, you know, some of my most creative clients have been those who are like CFO roles, fractional CFO or building a business in which they're doing finance for their clients. So that kind of creativity is not necessarily always going to translate to. I can manage the details of a project and have work that needs to get done and of my team that needs to get done.

So years ago, I had when I had the three people and I was thinking, Why do I need to worry about being the leader and getting better at it? I began to grow my team and I got to a certain point and I had somebody in the business who was doing this role and then ended up leaving the business. And I thought, OK, so what's my gap? My gap is I have nine ish, sometimes between 9 and 12 people on the team, depending what kind of projects we're working on, on my team who need to be given tasks and the stuff the work needs to be broken down into tasks that need to be assigned to people who need to be given deadlines. Sometimes their work is interconnected and that needs to be shared with each other. And then they need to be followed up with to make sure the work gets done. Now I did try to hire for people that you don't need to hire, don't need to follow up with. I do think I'm good at hiring. I have made many good hires in my business that I'm very, very happy with. But as I said, it's not necessarily a skill that I would expect everyone to have. You could easily bring in somebody who could then hire them. But I did have this group of people and I thought, OK, here's what I do not want to do. I do not want to, because this is not that kind of detail is not my gift. The detail of breaking down my task into small pieces and then assigning that. And then, you know, we have these ongoing tasks that happen every week, like sending a newsletter or several times a week, like posting to social media. So that kind of work, and if you're hearing of that and you think, Oh, let me get my hands on that, then you were probably someone who loves managing. And if you are hearing that and thinking, Oh, I've already checked out mentally on hearing any more about this, that's because you probably skew more towards big picture and leadership.

So that piece is what's missing for a lot of consultants. They have themselves and they have the team and they can manage their clients. But the thing that they're struggling to manage is their team and sometimes are struggling with client management because there can be a lot of details to handle in managing clients. So, you know, we have to print up these binders or we have to make sure everybody has passwords or we have to onboard the client. And that involves these steps and we need to do those steps over and over again. And if you're not a step by step following person, then that is going to run you aground. So this is where managers come in, and this is why I feel like leaders, yes, great exalted, wonderful change the world and managers keep the trains running on time. So these are the two components that you need to have in your business, and you can hold those both within yourself and possibly excel more at one than the other. But you can do all of those jobs yourself if you choose to be more of a one person business, or if you want to bring in one helper who will help you with that. However, when you get to where you have a larger team, including external teams, so including if you have, you know, two or three service providers who are doing things for you, then you might want to have somebody in your business whose job is to manage the service providers. So this project manager, role integrator, whatever you want to call them, COO, that might be a role that you want to look into.

So those are my thoughts on leaders versus managers and leadership versus management, both are things that you need to have within your business and not necessarily within you as a single person. So things to think about this week. Am I a manager or a leader? When am I managing? When am I leading? How do I feel about both of these roles? And is there a gap in my business that needs to be filled by someone else who can perform the management for me? Really, only you can be the leader of your business. You're the vision holder. You have the idea of where this whole thing is going. And so I want you to invest as much as you can in developing that for yourself. And I hope this has been edifying and informative for you. And with that, I'm going to wish you a profitable and joyful consulting business.