Leadership or Management?

Peter Drucker was interviewed on NPR a few years before he passed away and in that interview, he pointed out what he thought should be common knowledge — that all this talk about “leadership” is a bunch of horse hockey.

What Drucker said and consistently preached, and I agree with him, is that the business world doesn’t need leaders. It needs managers. It needs people who can actually manage a team of people.

Being a manager means being in service to the team. It means giving the team credit and making everyone else successful through providing them support, clearing out obstacles for them, providing guidance, encourgement, resources.

As we move forward in 2011, let’s value the real managers, who actually do the hard (and largely thankless) work of making other people productive.