There they stood, those two titans of political statesmanship, battling it out for the chance to be our next prime minister. On one side was Jeremy Hunt, measured and careful, pointing out the difficulties our country faces in its attempt to achieve Brexit. And opposing him was Boris Johnson, full of broad-brush optimism, rejecting what he called the “defeatist” attitude of his rival, declaring that great things would be possible if only we believed hard enough in the opportunity.
In their different and perhaps caricatured ways the two candidates embodied a classic, timeless question: which is more important, leadership or management? Should we favour the bold, big-picture utterance and worry about the detail later? Or is the discipline of focusing relentlessly on facts and reality the most important thing?
In business and sport as well as in politics, there is a tendency to elevate the task of leadership above the supposedly more banal question of management. Leaders do and say big and exciting things, and the rest of us are supposed to – well, follow. Leaders set out “big, hairy audacious goals”. They have vision and ambition.
Managers, in this view of the world, are more petty and unexciting. They supervise staff and cross off lists. They have no imagination. Think of a bad, enthusiasm-crushing manager as opposed to a dashing leader and a picture of David Brent comes to mind.
Some scholars of leadership effectively endorse this version. Warren Bennis, one of the most popular writers on the subject, once made this distinction: “The manager does things right; the leader does the right thing.” I think we know which of these two characters we are supposed to find more impressive.
Of course we do need confident, optimistic leaders. Who wants to work for a pessimist? “What’s the best level of confidence?”, asks Phil Rosenzweig in his book Left Brain, Right Stuff: How leaders make winning decisions. “It’s what we need to do better than our rivals.” But it can be a short step from life-enhancing optimism to reckless overconfidence. Narcissistic leaders set themselves up as the solution to all our problems. “Only I can fix this!” candidate Donald Trump told American voters in 2016. An outlandish claim, but not apparently preposterous enough to prevent him getting elected.
The trouble with this mythology of heroic leaders and banal managers is that it can only ever be a partial account of the truth, and is very often an entirely misleading one. One human being cannot transform a country or an organisation on their own. Good leaders delegate tasks and decisions to other people – managers. The actual work is done by middle managers and their teams.
Teddy Roosevelt may have told young Americans to “Keep your eyes on the stars”, but in the same breath he reminded them to “Keep your feet on the ground”. What happens when overambitious leaders are allowed to let rip, unrestrained by the sober judgments of competent managers? The disgraced blood-testing company Theranos is a good recent example. Theranos’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes, will go on trial next summer after her firm, once valued at more than $9bn, was found to have lied about its ability to test blood samples in an efficient and reliable way. Obsessed with Apple’s founder Steve Jobs, Holmes called her company’s (flawed) prototype “the iPod of healthcare”. On her desk stood a paperweight with a grand but telling question etched on it: “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?”
Delusions of grandeur of that kind might also encourage a careless leader to propose, picking some examples at random, a new airport in the middle of the Thames estuary, a cable car going from nowhere to nowhere, a multimillion-pound garden bridge that will never get built, and an overpriced pastiche bus that is stiflingly hot to travel on.
Michael Ashcroft, no Conservative moderate but also a student of military history and leadership, has endorsed Hunt over Johnson to be the next prime minister. “In a crisis, I would want him in charge,” he wrote. “And if I were employing one of them to run a big, complicated project – which is what we are doing – I would choose him.” Management 1, leadership 0.
In fact this distinction, between the M and L words, is probably a rather unhelpful one in the end. We need bosses who can do both. And nobody makes the case better or more pungently than the management guru Tom Peters, who once told me: “This so-called difference between leadership and management is a totally bullshit, useless, counterproductive idea. It’s about human beings getting things done. The simple-minded way I put it is: a good manager has to be a good leader, and a good leader has to be a good manager … and, you know, get over it!”
• Stefan Stern is co-author of Myths of Management
