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Management Material
Welcome to Management Material.
My name is Catherine Van Der Laan. I started my career at the bottom as an assistant and worked my way up to become the boss’s boss in 8 years. If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that what got you to where you are now won’t get you to where you want to be.
This podcast is for top performers who want to be amazing managers. I’ve coached lots of talented people to get them from entry-level to recognized top performers to new managers to seasoned executives. I challenge deeply held beliefs and change how people see the world.
Management is all about leadership. The best managers were developed leaders long before they had any direct reports.
Here's one thing that most people won't tell you: Management is a skill. Management is a skill you can learn, just like the hard skills that got you to where you are now.
Management Material is about developing you into the best manager you can be. Let’s turn YOU into management material.
Management Material
Leadership vs. Management: What's the Difference Between a Manager and a Leader?
"People don't leave jobs; they leave managers." - a common managerial proverb
Getting the title of "manager" doesn't automatically qualify you as a leader. Most managers (at least 58%, according to one study) are so bad at leadership that their employees call them "toxic" and leave.
If that doesn't sound an alarm for you, I don't know what would.
In today's podcast episode, we'll tackle the distinct difference between being a manager and a leader. I go into my first foray into management and the stupid stuff I did right out of the gate.
Don't do what I did. Listen to this podcast episode so you can dodge some of the most common management mistakes and grow as a leader before you fail as a manager.
Book a complimentary management coaching conversation at https://calendly.com/catherine-vanderlaan/free-60-minute-leadership-consultation
Email me at catherine@managementmaterialcoaching.com to ask a question or get in touch.
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Find out more about Management and Leadership Coaching at https://managementmaterialcoaching.com/
manager is someone who organizes work. That's what managers are there for. They are there to organize work to make sure that productive people, people with skills, are given the work that is best for the company, the work that they can do. Managers know the skills of their employees and they assign work according to those skills. What part of that is leadership? None of it. None of that is leadership. Me having all of her work go through me, micromanaging, checking her work, getting a daily report what part of that is leadership? None of that was leadership. Leadership is about inspiring, encouraging and engaging people, regardless of the leader's formal authority, title or position. Managers direct work. Leaders move spirits to form teams that really want to work together to accomplish a purpose or a vision.
Speaker 1:Welcome to Management Material. My name is Katherine Vanderlaan. I started my career at the bottom as an assistant and worked my way up to become the boss's boss in eight years and man, I love management. Welcome back to Management Material. My name is Katherine Vanderlaan, and today we're going to be discussing the difference between management and leadership. I train new managers. I was a new manager myself. I do a lot of group leadership and management coaching. I help leaders become leaders people want to follow. So let's talk about this big difference between management and leadership. One of the very first things that I do when I am helping a leader become a leader people want to follow is identifying the difference between a manager and a leader. So let me ask you this what is the difference between a manager and a leader? To answer that, let me tell you a story.
Speaker 1:My very first foray into management involved managing a summer intern. She was lovely, she was so great. I coordinated with HR to find the right people to interview not everybody who applied, but handpicked team or a handpicked few who applied. I arranged the interviewing team and then I made a hiring decision. So I was allowed this authority to make that hiring decision. It was my first time. I was so excited. I was so excited to be a manager, at least for a summer.
Speaker 1:When it came to onboarding, I had no idea what to do. So I figured it would be a good idea to introduce her to the people she was going to be working with, the systems we had in place and the products we were developing. Simple enough, right? Yes, people processes products. Let's do it. And this is what I tell other people to do. It was, I thought, pretty good onboarding.
Speaker 1:Then it came time to give her some work to do. Now I don't know if you know this, but new hires, and particularly new interns, can either be really good and dedicated, proactive and productive they're really invested in what we're doing or they can be expecting to coast at the job and not get too much productive work done and generally just try to stay invisible while collecting a paycheck. I thought I had hired the first. I thought she was going to be proactive. I thought she would be productive. By her third week I figured out that her expectations were more centered around coasting. Now let's saying this from my perspective at the time. I will give you my perspective now, in a few minutes. And we're also we're going to get into hiring and what I learned in hiring in another episode. So don't don't worry about that, we'll get into that at that point.
Speaker 1:At this point, I had a challenge to face with this intern. It had been a few weeks about well, it had been two weeks and some days she wasn't getting much done. I had to figure out do I figure out how to motivate my intern to try harder or do I let it go? Do I just let her coast all summer. Now I don't know if you have figured this out about me, but I don't let too many things go, and I wanted to prove myself as a manager. It was my first foray into management, so I decided to try to motivate her to do some work. Then I had another challenge how can I make sure she's doing worthwhile work, worthwhile for the company and worthwhile for her? It was an internship. She had to come away from it with something she had learned about the company, about the industry, something that was an educational component, and I took this very, very seriously. They had to present those learnings to the company and then to their school. So this intern was from a school in Boston. She was studying the industry, so she was getting a particular degree in the industry, and so she wanted to learn something. Now she didn't think that the job yet was very interesting and she wasn't entirely sure what she was going to learn. We had 10 weeks left in the internship.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we had to dig a little deeper before the internship was over, and that was okay. I really thought that that would motivate her. So let me tell you what I did. I started asking her for daily accountability in her work and started having all of her work go through me. Now I'm not telling you that that was a good thing to do. I'm just telling you what I did. What I did, I became an intense micromanager. Micromanaging is not natural to me. I hate it and that wasn't my proudest moment, but that's what I did. That's what I did. I just didn't know what else to do. And again, I'm not telling you to do this. That's just what I did. So she started sending me daily reports and I started being a bottleneck in her projects. Yeah, it motivated her in the short term. It got her to pay attention to what she was doing. Try to check some boxes and tell me what it was that she was accomplishing every single day. But it also slowed down the work that she could have been doing. Throughout all of those decisions, I decided to be a manager, not a leader. Now, I don't know if you saw any leadership in there, but from where I am now, I don't see leadership coming out. I see managing A manager is someone who organizes work.
Speaker 1:That's what managers are there for. Organizes work that's what managers are there for. They are there to organize work, to make sure that productive people, people with skills are given the work that is best for the company, the work that they can do. Managers know the skills of their employees and they assign work according to those skills. What part of that is leadership? None of it. None of that is leadership. Me having all of her work go through me, micromanaging, checking her work, getting a daily report what part of that is leadership? None of that was leadership. Leadership is about inspiring, encouraging and engaging people, regardless of the leader's formal authority. Encouraging and engaging people regardless of the leader's formal authority, title or position. Managers direct work. Leaders move spirits to form teams that really want to work together to accomplish a purpose or a vision. Do you see the difference? I was acting as a manager, not a leader.
Speaker 1:I really thought at that point that I was doing a good job managing this intern, but I wasn't. I wasn't developing leadership skills. I learned HR systems and how to onboard employees, but I didn't learn how to encourage her to fulfill a goal or a vision until until A few weeks went by. It was maybe, maybe like week five at this point, somewhere around there, and she had a 13 or 14 weekend internship, something like that, maybe 12. A few weeks went by and I sat down with my former boss and mentor. She asked me how it was going with my new intern and I opened up to her that it was hard getting her to really care about her work at all and be proactive. I couldn't find figure out why she didn't care. See, I cared a lot and she did not care and it was really eating at me. I knew. I knew something wasn't clicking. I was blaming the intern instead of trying to figure out what it was that I was doing. Then she asked me a very simple question what have you given her to care about? Does she know why she's here and what she's helping the team do it? Finally, in that moment it finally clicked.
Speaker 1:The intern had no idea what our team was trying to build and why we were all there. She didn't know the strategy, the changes we were trying to facilitate in the market or the changes we had already made in the market. She didn't know what we were doing. She didn't know her future or if she was behind the work at all. She didn't care because she didn't know our why. She didn't know why we were doing it. I know that sounds super fluffy, you know. Oh, she didn't know our why. It sounds super fluffy but it really isn't. She had no reason to care, none at all.
Speaker 1:So I started learning the fundamentals of leadership. So I started learning the fundamentals of leadership. I asked her to join me and another colleague I think it was either an acquisitions editor or a marketing manager, someone like that. I can't actually remember who it was, so sorry, but I know I wasn't alone. So I asked her to join me and another colleague in a conference room so we could practice our strategy presentations and get her feedback. So it must have been an acquisition center.
Speaker 1:Now that I'm thinking about it, she asked amazing questions about our market segmentation, what it all meant, the needs of the customers and what we were trying to get approval to do to fill those needs. So we were there practicing and we didn't really need to practice at that point, but we were. We were asking for approval and she was engaged. She asked why we weren't trying to make things for all of the market segments at once. So we brought up our SWOT analysis of our business and how it applied to each market segment. She got really into it, guys. She got super into it. I mean personally, strategy is really is super fascinating, so of course she was into it. Then she asked a really great question so what are we doing now to help these customers? And my colleague and I explained it to her. We talked about which market segment and which of their problems we were trying to solve right now. We got into how the team operated and what we were all looking for for feedback from customers. We talked about the whole picture really, what everybody was doing, how they fit in, how this was helping us and informing our strategy, moving things along. We talked about analytics and how each data point came from a real person with real needs. Data is not just data. Each point of data has a person to back it up. Over the next few weeks, she changed her intern project to facilitate more fluid information sharing between departments, because at that time and maybe it's not like this now or not like this in your organization, but between the departments we actually had a hard time sharing information, getting access to each other's systems, knowing what everybody had access to that could help inform strategies and products and launches and all that stuff. Through all of her questioning and looking at our strategies, she facilitated that fluid information sharing so we could better solve our customers' problems. It was a great project. It was so great and it helped with all of our work For years. It helped with our work.
Speaker 1:I made the mistake of thinking that because I had some formal signed authority over my intern, that she would do what I thought was best. I was excited and organized, keeping a close eye on what she was already doing and how she was doing it. That that was the tactic that I took at the beginning. I was a little mini manager ready to manage and actually I was micromanaging. That doesn't inspire anyone. But I wasn't a leader. Until I saw beyond that surface work, I realized that she wasn't inspired, didn't understand the purpose of our work and was operating just to get a solid recommendation. Really she had selfish purposes and it's because she didn't know anything else. She had no other information. She didn't know what we were doing, so she couldn't have any other purposes. She didn't ask questions because she didn't feel safe enough or valued enough and didn't trust me.
Speaker 1:I learned the difference that summer between being a manager and a leader. Now I did have the privilege to figure it out with an intern and I asked for that privilege. I asked to manage the intern and my boss at the time gave me that opportunity. I learned to build trust by providing a safe space, involving her in the process, opening up our strategy and our whole team's thinking, asking her to ask questions at different times. I didn't tell you that because you're not sitting in the meeting. You didn't see how it happened. She asked great questions because I asked her to ask and she didn't know it was safe to ask questions. Until I told her it was safe, I showed her that it can be fun and that we were solving a problem we didn't know how to solve together as a team. We were all doing it together. We were using all of our minds together, we were all adapting and I was asking her to join us in the short time that she had with us. Thankfully, she got on board. So that's good. Not everybody gets on board, but she did. She was excited to know what we were doing and excited to get on board. So here's good. Not everybody gets on board, but she did. She was excited to know what we were doing and excited to get on board. So here's the bottom line.
Speaker 1:Managers are not leaders simply because they have authority over others. Leaders inspire people. They bring them on board a thought-led team and truly care about the people around them because they're people, not because of what they can do. Leaders create safe spaces for people to thrive. They call the people around them to be excellent, to keep growing, to do what they say they will do and that means holding them to standards to tackle challenges together in that safe space, and then they acknowledge each person's unique contribution. They thank people for what they've done. Leaders lead because they care. That's very, very different from a manager's job of organizing work. I hope you see that difference.
Speaker 1:So what can you do with this new information? What can you do now If you're already a manager? Stop and reflect on how well you're leading. Are you creating emotionally safe environments for people to try and fail and get back up again? Are you facilitating team conversations that give everyone a voice and a chance to contribute? And I don't mean that in some sort of lofty goal. I mean everybody has a unique experience and perspective and can lend that to whatever it is you're doing. You can tell whether you're leading or just managing by how your team works right now. If they're learning and growing, trying to be excellent and do their jobs really well, then you're probably leading and you can stop and think about what you're doing to lead and how you can improve. If your team isn't learning and growing and they're checking boxes instead of being innovative, then you're probably only managing.
Speaker 1:Contact me. Let's change that. If you're not a manager yet, you can set yourself up as the next obvious choice management material. Right To be a manager by leading. Create emotionally safe spaces. Ask people in private why they don't participate if they're not participating, and then help figure out a way to help them feel safe enough to get involved in the team. Facilitate the creation of safe spaces. Hear about the people around you, because they're people. Get to know them and then reach out to me for guidance. I can help you skip years of self-development and skip it, because it won't take years. It'll take months. Book a complimentary consultation and we can figure out what kind of coaching if any at all will serve you best. If it doesn't fit you, I will let you know. Let's make sure you are known as management material and I'll see you in the next episode.