These days, in our workplace, at home, and in politics, we have less and less leadership, and more management. The structure of our social and economic system depends on this shift towards management, and the result for all people is alienation and detachment from public life.
There is no one definition of management. Many simply say “management is what managers do”. But for the purpose of separating leadership from management, we can come up with a definition of management that encapsulates many definitions:

Management is an act which, carried out by the higher levels of business administration in a stakeholder situation, plans, organizes, and controls people.

Management is essential in a social and economic system that attempts more and more to control without appearing to control. It uses business research to break time down into very specific parts, and assigns certain tasks and rates of pay to those pieces of time.

Leadership is obvious. It is out in the open. In contrast, management disguises hierarchy with language.

The strength of this comparison, and this argument, is based on the concept of “stakeholders” – people who have something to lose or gain from some process. Managers abide by stakeholders, leaders do not.

Today, most politicians do as much as possible to avoid causing offence. Their speeches are bland and state the obvious. When they answer questions, they do not really answer the question. Theirs is a managerial style. They are concerned about stakeholders – corporations, the managers and representatives of other nations, managers and representatives of international organizations, and voters (probably in that order). To deal with the pressure exerted by these stakeholders, the politician, especially those in higher positions of power, have a throng of bureaucrats guiding every speech, every policy, every answer to a question (the “talking points”). The result is a bland figure who, based on guidance from their legion of suit-and-tie paper-pushers who sit in big buildings and move around and substitute words until they find some that ultimately says nothing, shows no charisma, no charm, has nothing new and exciting to say – essentially has all the personality of a lump of coal. Finally, politicians’ “communications directors” assure that it all happens as predictably as live theatre. In this sense, politicians and their bureaucrats and inner-circles function as management. Plan, organize, control; nothing more. Not with all of these stakeholders involved.

In the workplace, despite the “team leader” language, we mostly have managers. Our supervisors are often “accountable” to (get in trouble by; afraid of) somebody higher up – another manager. Our supervisors do not inspire us or go above and beyond their duties. They rarely socialize with or bother to get to know their subordinates. They simply plan, organize, and control. And they must, because another manager higher-up, a stakeholder, has planned and organized a very specific way for things to happen. And from that higher-up position, they can control simply by placing all of the responsibility on the manager below them. There are various ways to exert this pressure on lower managers. One popular way is to provide “incentives”. For example, if the lower manager can cut back overtime pay to less than $500 a month, the higher manager will provide a percentage of that saved money to the lower manager. Other “incentives” are often phrased as “goals” or “targets”, ie: the higher manager will hand down a list of “goals”, such as “this week we will sell so many quantities of X, and make Y many phone-calls to Z that produce Q number of new clients”, etc, etc. The subtle message to the lower manager is “this had better happen or you are not doing your job”, and we all know what happens to people who cannot do their job – demotion, re-location, “re-assignment” – call it what you want. The people working in the lowest echelon end up not understanding their managers at all, feeling detached, trying to figure out “why boss is wound so tight” over stupid things. They cannot see or understand the pressure being exerted from an even higher manager. Instead, they just see a manager who seems unnaturally obsessed, anti-social, driven by quotas and numbers that come from nowhere. Taking all of this into account, any attempt by the lower manager to appear friendly or “like one of the guys” is dismissed as lame and weasel-like.

In the home and in our families we see more and more management. The planning, organizing and control that goes into budgeting, purchasing consumables, home renovation, even family trips, is now the most time consuming and important part of family life. There is less leisure time or “nothing” time. Moments not spent planning for or organizing the next big thing are moments wasted. The small, spontaneous things are excluded – that time is now often used to plan and organize the latest family “project”. The “projects” become neurotic obsessions that require sophisticated forms of control: “We have to replace these windows”. “We are ‘going green’”. “We need to buy X and Y so we can make or have a Z”. “We need to go online and book X, confirm Y”.
The stakeholder in the family situation is the family itself. Trends in the media especially pressure families to “keep up”. It seems that half of the new television programs and non-fiction books available implore us to renovate, redecorate, take this trip, go on this diet, follow this exercise program, “go green”, buy this and that or your quality of life will suffer. And the family, in a way, believes it is on reality TV; that everybody is looking at them, judging their home, their car, their clothes, etc. Then there is an abundance of shows that feel the need to show us how rich people live. Amazing houses, amazing cars, amazing gardens, amazing clothes and jewellery, amazing parties. The strange thing is, we seek out these shows. We like them. We are an embarrassment to hundreds of years of class struggle. People once got so angry they were willing to fight and die for equality. Today, we ogle the possessions and lifestyles of our masters on TV – and essentially masturbate.
Our strange obsessions then, whose origins I cannot really explain here, make the family itself a stakeholder, and make managers out of parents.

Leadership is full of heart. It can inspire you, make you feel closer to people, make you a better person. It innovates. Leaders may have stakeholders, but they do not have to abide by them. They have their own vision and way of doing things, as well as a unique rapport with those who work with them. Leadership can exist in a management environment, but the leader always assumes some risk. A leader in the workplace is willing to be reprimanded – in fact, a leader may expect to be reprimanded. Leaders in politics know they may do or say some things that put their candidacy or their seat at risk. Leaders at home put their reputations, and sometimes even the well being of their family at risk. But they are the parents who are much more than just figureheads and do-nothings. They are exceptional. They break the conventions and try new ways of raising their kids. Meanwhile, management is very deliberate in considering all the risks involved. It “plays it safe” and “covers its ass”. Leadership can be reckless. It may understand the risks, but not do anything to mitigate them. Because leaders are passionate, they are more like the people we truly admire or remember in history. We quote parts of their speeches decades, generations, even a century later. They make changes that everybody talks about for years.

In the Canadian military, there were once ten “principles of leadership”. I think they encapsulate the essence of leadership, so here they are with some explanations:

1. Achieve professional competence – get better at your job
2. Appreciate your own strengths and limitations and pursue self-improvement – know what you’re good at, but admit and acknowledge your faults; mistakes.
3. Seek and accept responsibility – go out and take on new tasks, take the blame for what happens.
4. Lead by example – this one is beautifully self-explanatory.
5. Make sure that your followers know your meaning and intent, then lead them to the accomplishment of the mission – keep your followers informed of the overall goal and complete the task you set out to complete.
6. Know your soldiers and promote their welfare – again, self-explanatory
7. Develop the leadership potential of your followers – train new leaders. This is a humble, modest thing to do. By doing this, you acknowledge that you are nobody special; that there is room for somebody to take your place or take on your role.
8. Make sound and timely decisions – self-explanatory.
9. Train your soldiers as a team and employ them up to their capabilities – push your team to do the difficult things. Train hard so you can fight easy.
10. Keep your followers informed of the mission, the changing situation and the overall picture – self-explanatory.

The point here, actually, is that leadership is principled, while management is procedural.

Here is a description of the “key activities” performed by a manager at a government agency:

- Manages multi-disciplinary teams in diverse geographic urban and rural areas engaged in the agency’s work.
- Manages human and financial resources in a 7/24 shift operation. Takes action on staff relations issues, interpersonal conflicts and client complaints. Monitors and makes recommendations on work flow and administrative duties.
- Manages risk within the work environment to achieve effective results. Authorizes certain procedures.
- Manages and participates in national, regional and local change initiatives and pilots to meet the agency’s mission, vision, values and strategic objectives. Recommends modifications to the initiatives and pilots.
- Ensures that effective relationships are maintained with the public, private enterprise and partner federal government departments and agencies.

It is strange that the “key activity”, if you pay close attention to the verb used most often, is “manage”. Therefore, the key thing a manager should be doing at this job is “managing”. It is like reading a job description that says the worker will have to “work”.
Notice some of the differences between these “key activities” and the principles of leadership: 1) The words “followers” and “soldiers” is replaced by the term “human resources”. This language speaks to the scientific-type breakdown of time and space by management. 2) Instead of “know your soldiers and promote their welfare”, there is only “takes action on staff relations issues (and) interpersonal conflicts”. A manager cares about his “human resources” because their “issues” may affect their work, thus affecting productivity or profit. A leader cares about his “followers” just because. 3) A manager “takes action” on “client complaints” and “ensures that effective relationships are maintained with the public, private enterprise and partner federal government departments and agencies”. This is the stakeholder aspect of management. In the principles of leadership there is no mention of anyone beyond the leader and his followers.

Managers do not do things because they believe those things are right. They do them because that is the procedure required to satisfy the stakeholders. This is not to say that leaders cannot follow procedures – they can. But the overall care of the leader is doing something right, regardless of established procedures.
Management is set up precisely to dull the passionate and principled way of leaders. It must do this because leaders can make their followers see the true condition of their lives. The leader at work shows his fellow workers that there is a different way to do business, and opens workers’ eyes to their true working conditions. The leader in politics arouses too much honest debate, and may make our country stand out or stand up in a world where there can only be a few great and influential powers.

We need leadership in every day life, at home and at work. Lets replace our current office managers – the type who merely “inform” us (undoubtedly due to some requirement in their list of procedures) of “team-building exercises” and “office luncheons” – with leaders who throw parties, barbeques, etc.

Above all, however, we need leadership where it is perhaps most rare - in politics. We are so used to a “management” style of politician, it is difficult to even imagine how a leader would look and act.
Here are some thoughts:

- Daring – the political leader would dare to do things that are contentious in his country, but which also show leadership in the world. A Canadian political leader would not be afraid to piss off the United States. Usually, people make a “business case” for pandering a bit to the States. “After all”, they say, “they’re our largest trading partner”. But the very idea of “partnership” implies mutual respect. A Canada that stands up for itself and has some guts to be different in the world will do just fine business-wise. A Canada that has a leader who speaks out, and whose face appears on newspapers abroad, will certainly garner some attention.
- The political leader would not play stupid parliamentary partisan politics. They would show us delicate, careful, clear, sound reasoning. A political leader would show up at the scrum and concede “yeah, he’s probably right. I think we’ll have to get together and revise what we’ve come up with now. You live, you learn”. How refreshing it would be to hear our politicians speak like adults!
- No more speeches or policies without heart and substance. No more speechwriters, and especially no more communications directors massaging the message, piling and sculpting phrases like a hairstylist building a bouffant. If you write a policy that does not state a position – it is not a policy. If your speech does not say anything different – maybe you are not leadership material. There is a reason why people quote Abe Lincoln and Winston Churchill, and why they will never quote Stephen Harper or Paul Martin. The latter two have never said anything worth repeating.

Management is a subtle yet very powerful modern form of social control which alienates us and detaches us from public life and from each other. Those who call themselves managers, and follow very specific procedures to satisfy stakeholders, perpetrate it. Therefore, it is something that we can fight against by recognizing it in ourselves, or in others. It is not some natural component of the capitalist system, or a conspiracy. It is simply something modern western society found efficient, which required little effort, little conflict, and also happened to be one of the most powerful forms of social control ever devised.