When we talk about leadership, we tend to lack precision. Often, we use similar words interchangeably. The most common substitution is to confuse leadership with management, but the two are not the same.
Recently I was reading the American Management Association’s AMA Handbook of Leadership and one of the authors did a masterful job drawing out the differences:
- Administration: “Execution through rules, policies, and procedures.”
- Management: “Getting results and doing so efficiently.”
- Leadership: “Vision of the future and the ability to energize others to pursue it.” (Mills and Novell, in Goldsmith, Baldoni & McArthur, 2010, p. 36).
As I thought about these definitions, it makes sense that you never hear people say, “He is a natural born Administrator.” This is the reason we hate the DMV, but we pine for leaders who will take us to the future.
As I thought about it some more, I thought about the respective suffixes of each of the root words. When I looked them up in various dictionaries, here is what I found:
- Administrat·ion: –ion: A state of being or condition (e.g., Invention, legalization, rotation, taxation, supervision).
- Manage·ment: –ment: An action or resulting state or condition (e.g., employment, Judgment, movement, punishment, segment).
- Leader·ship: –ship: Relationship with another (e.g., Citizenship, dictatorship, friendship, lordship)
As I ruminated on how the words were constructed, the distinctions between the terms came into sharper focus. Administration is a state or condition and management is active, but leadership, by definition, must be part of relationship. You can manage inventory, but you cannot lead it.
So I began to wonder if the use of a double-suffix may not be more appropriate: leader-ship-ment. Sure leadershipment is a mouthful, but isn’t it supposed to be action in relationship? Without the action, the relationship is not going anywhere.
I doubt that the word will gain any traction, but I like the term anyway. It is a reminder to me and I hope it is helpful to you as you lead your people.
-Darin Gerdes
______________
Dr. Darin Gerdes is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in the School of Business at Charleston Southern University. All ideas expressed on www.daringerdes.com are his own.