[00:00:00] Janet Taggart: Leadership is to cause something to happen that wasn’t going to happen anyway; it’s a causal factor.

[00:00:13] Stephanie Willmore: Welcome to the Leadership Transformations podcast. My name is Stephanie Willmore, host and senior consultant at Peridot Circle Consulting. In this episode, we’re sharing a coaching moment with one of our co-founders, Janet Taggart, who is leading a group of leaders in a discussion about one of the most important distinctions in leadership: the difference between leadership and management.

[00:00:36] When organizations are navigating change, it’s easy for teams to stay busy while lacking forward progress. In those moments, understanding the role of management and where leadership must step in can make all the difference. In this coaching segment, Janet shares the Integrated Leadership Model, which explores how understanding the different components of leadership, management, and development all play different roles to help organizations succeed.

[00:01:03] When leaders have clarity about all of these components, they can create greater momentum for their organizations, even when circumstances feel unpredictable. We hope you enjoy this discussion.

[00:01:14] Janet Taggart: The Integrated Leadership Model is something that we developed in recognition that there are three distinct areas of everyone’s role.

[00:01:26] So, those of you who are leading teams, and you are leading individual contributors or other managers, they have these three areas in their job role. We often think that leadership only belongs to those with the leadership title, but we want to disabuse our teams, our individual contributors of that because they have a real role in being culture creators by taking the part of leadership that’s commensurate with their role.

[00:01:52] First, we’ll start with management. And management is to provide predictability, reliability, and certainty. These are the things that you do at a cadence, and without these management areas, it’s very hard to operate in the other two areas because this is the foundational piece.

[00:02:19] There are certain things in our job role that need to be done when they need to be done, right, to the quality they need to be done, to provide predictability, making it reliable and certain, like something that happens like clockwork. And when you perform the management part of your role, again, it provides a solid platform from which to innovate, from which to move to leadership.

[00:02:43] So, management allows for leadership. Now, our definition of leadership is to cause something to happen that wasn’t going to happen anyway. It’s a causal factor. I was speaking with somebody yesterday and we were kind of joking. He was like, “Yeah, if things happened without leaders and without leadership, we’d all be automated and we wouldn’t need leaders. Everybody would just do everything perfectly in sync.” And you know, that’s never going to happen.

[00:03:15] And so leadership actually happens in the face of challenge. That’s when you need leaders. You may even wonder, like, “What am I doing here? Am I qualified?” We have those self-doubts sometimes, and you can just say, “You know, what I’m experiencing right now could be, is a call, or my life’s way of inviting me to another level of leadership. Through this challenge, there’s something that life is preparing me for at another level.”

[00:03:52] So, leadership is not the management part; it’s not the predictable stuff. It’s the vision. It’s the proposing of. It’s the recommendation. It’s having an idea of what’s possible and having conversation about that, right?

[00:04:12] A lot of times, especially when we move into management for the first time, it can be difficult because we’re used to being individual contributors or team leads where we are judged and scored, if you will, on what we get done. Like the tactical, management stuff, like that’s what we get scored on. And yet, as you get into formalized leadership, formalized leadership roles, you’ll be in conversations where there won’t be an immediate outcome. There’s not an immediate to-do list as a result of this conversation.

[00:04:54] That can be frustrating because you’re like, “Okay, all we did was sit there and talk about this great stuff.” So let’s say, though, you’re sitting with your leader and your peers. You know, people that report to your peer. It’s a meeting where there’s just a lot of idea generation. I’ve heard this scenario often—a lot of ideas like, “I wonder if we could do this,” or “Would it be possible to do that?” Hear the language of it: possibility. “I wonder if…”

[00:05:24] How is that helpful? If it’s not about developing your people per se, and it’s just about the direction of the team and what’s possible and what we’d like to cause to happen, like where’s the value?

[00:05:36] Those type of conversations, though they can engender frustration, when you don’t realize there’s a different conversation happening because there’s no to-do list, it’s important because. Those are the times you can start connecting dots. You can say, “Oh, my leader’s talking about this,” right? We’re having a conversation about AI, for example. Everybody’s talking about AI, right? But AI, or this particular initiative, like, they’re talking—We’re having this conversation about what’s possible and nothing’s really coming out of it. And it’s like, okay, so as I have the vision for my team and I think about what’s possible for my team, if I want to be able to speak into what my leader is listening for, they’re in tune for, we can start to say, “Oh, if I have an idea that we could do in our area having to do with this larger conversation, I’m finding an intersection with what interests me and what interests them.”

[00:06:45] I can then create a vision for my team that’s aligned with higher parts of the organization, and I have a way of making my own proposals and leading my own team toward that end. So it’s really valuable. Even though it feels like we’re not doing much, we’re just kind of “Gee, wouldn’t it be nice?”—obviously, there are conversations that just end there, but these types of conversations are important.

[00:07:12] And then, as you’ve been involved in that higher conversation, you can then be the bridge to your team to say, “Hey, we’re talking a lot about this type of initiative, this AI, or that we’re really interested in how we can bring outside vendors in to do some of our work. This is really an impetus, so let’s be thinking about, as we do our day-to-day work, what we can possibly shed as we do our day-to-day work so we can contribute to this larger conversation.” So it’s very useful and it allows you to innovate within your sphere.

[00:07:49] Leadership invites development, right? When you can guide the leadership conversation into, “What do you think is standing in our way from actually executing on something like that?” The leadership conversation can help you understand what the outcome is they’re trying to go for, inasmuch as they know it, right? You try to shore that up and also understand what they’re afraid of.

[00:08:15] So as you go into development, as you start to turn that possibility into reality and figure out what’s feasible, and then into reality, right? So this is where a lot of things happen. And it’s always tricky because, for a lot of folks in technology, the development piece is actually part of the management piece; it’s part of the job role. But we’re also talking about your leadership capabilities, right?

[00:08:43] Noticing when you’re in development is really important too, to not think, “Oh, we have this vision, let’s just execute on it in management.” It’s like, “No, give us some time to kind of move the pieces around.” You’re in development and trying to figure out where the politics lie, who the key stakeholders are, and what their proclivities are as far as what they expect. There’s a lot of stuff going on, right?

[00:09:12] So that leadership conversation allows you to poke around a little bit and then make sure you bring them on the journey. Whenever you’re doing significant change or things that are disruptive, that’s part of the leadership conversation. How do I… okay, so you’ve talked to this key person and they’re like, “Oh yeah, I want you to do that. Go for it.” It’s like okay, so I’ve got some buy-in here, but there are a lot of other pieces that have to align in order for this to actually happen. So how can I have, you know, paint that vision for those who will be possibly directly affected?

[00:09:52] You don’t want to come out of development too quick. It’s kind of like, when do you automate? When you first put something together, if you automate too fast, then something has to be changed; the whole automation is at risk, right? So, same thing here. When there’s a piece of your leadership or a new thing in your job role that’s under development, you want to make sure that it’s like 80% done, right? It’s mostly done, and there’s just incremental improvements that need to take place. That’s when it goes into management.

[00:10:29] Stephanie Willmore: We hope it was clear in this discussion that in times of uncertainty, leaders are often tempted to focus only on maintaining stability, but leadership calls for us to do more than preserve what exists. It asks us to notice where new possibilities can emerge and to help our teams move towards them.

[00:10:47] If you are an HR leader committed to building a strong leadership pipeline or a business leader that understands that the company’s growth depends on the growth of your people, we would love to connect with you. We invite you also to appreciate the experiences that have brought you to this point in your life’s journey, and we invite you to stay open to the possibilities within you. You were meant for greater things. Until next time.

At Peridot Circle, we facilitate the growth and transformation of individuals, leaders, and emerging leaders of fast-growing tech-savvy organizations. If any of our listeners are interested in learning more about our approach to leadership coaching at Peridot Circle Consulting and how to help transform how you show up at work, book a consult with us online at peridotcircleconsulting.com. We would love to help you and your organization achieve more than ever before.