How often have you heard of your organisation or other organisations mention a need for leadership training? Leadership is the flavour of the month or year or decade… and we love it – it’s why we get out of bed every morning! We love it so much that we live and breathe it. For those who don’t though, It seems you cannot escape it! We are bombarded with leadership ideas and thoughts everywhere we look. From airport bookstores to social media… everyone is talking about leadership.
Focusing on leadership is a fantastic initiative. It is great to see a surge in organisations embracing the development of leadership skills for now and in the future. Somewhere along the way though, we seem to have forgotten about management. We have been so caught up in the excitement of leadership that management is often forgotten about it. The lines between leadership and management are now blurred. So much, that we hardly hear any of our clients refer to ‘management issues’. Instead, we find organisations insistently asking for leadership training.
Would you be surprised to know that 80% of the ‘issues’ most of our clients come to us with aren’t actually leadership issues?
When we put on our curious Red Wolf Group hats and ask a few probing questions, we often find the same underlying issues.
- Poor communication
- Inability to give or receive feedback
- Lack of accountability
- Inefficient planning and time management
- Lack of strategic direction or vision application
Yes, these aspects can be related to leadership development. But, when we break it down what we see is a lack of core management skills. These skills are being triaged with leadership training. And this triage training is focusing on the wrong skill development.
Let’s go back to basics and understand the core traditional difference between management and leadership.
Managers get tasks done with people to achieve goals.
Leaders inspire and motivate people to achieve goals.
To help break it down even further we have created our own competency framework. Our framework articulates the difference between leading and managing. We like to keep things simple here at Red Wolf Group and easy to understand. Introducing you to our 3E’s of Leadership and 3C’s of Management framework:
3C’s of Management
3E’s of Leadership
So next time you’re faced with an issue in the workplace, ask yourself, is it a leadership skill gap? Or a management skill gap? Chances are if your management team have never been exposed to management skills, it’s probably a management skill gap. Don’t triage management skills with leadership skills.
Keen to learn more? Reach out to the team at Red Wolf Group today and learn about our Red Wolf Academy Programs!
