Just a Million Strokes: Leadership vs Management

Written by Ron Jones for HRiQ

I had spent some time in recent weeks trying to really come to terms with the difference between leadership and management. I know that there are plenty of theoretical and research-based differences about roles, personality types and a range of other key components. What I was looking for was what we as HR practitioners could do to tangibly promote leadership.

And then I attended a presentation by Roz Savage.

For those of you who don’t know, Roz was the first woman to row solo across the Pacific Ocean, having already conquered the Atlantic. In the next few days after her talk, she would set out to conquer the Indian Ocean.

During her presentation, she commented that the first leg of the Pacific was ”just a million strokes." I don’t pretend to know anything about what it is like to embark on such a journey, but it gave me a jolt to think that most of us are overawed by such large numbers and the challenge that this presents.

There was also another realization that struck me: most of us are really good at giving up on something when we don’t like it and then moving onto something else.

But if you’re in the middle of the Pacific, and you’ve only done 350,000 strokes, you can’t give up! Where else would you go? Savage’s journey meant making a huge commitment—and having made the commitment, being prepared to see it through to the end.

Most of us in the workplace get stuck at some point. We give up on the task we are doing and move to something else; we go home and complain about the boss, the work, or something else— although we don’t often complain about ourselves!

A million is a huge number of strokes! Imagine the prospect of waking up each day and repeating the same action 10,000 times before you go to sleep again, only to wake up and do the same thing over, and over, and over.

Savage spoke about what inspired her to make the first solo journey. It was very much a personal exploration – something which took her completely out of the comfort zone of everything that she had done and what she was doing at the time.

It occurred to me that one difference between leadership and management is that management occurs within our comfort zone; true leadership takes us outside of that zone.

Think about the people who most inspire us as leaders. They inspire us because they take that extra step, do something which is counter-intuitive or really put their own interests on the line.

Most of us in HR roles like to play it safe. We rarely step outside of our own comfort zones, and many of us just strive to effectively maintain the status quo in our organizations. We are hardly ever presented with a mandate to take ourselves outside of our defined role, and yet this is precisely what we need to do. We need to challenge many of the assumptions within the organizations we work in. We should constantly be looking for the organizational challenges which not only build our own leadership capacity, but which also provide opportunities for others.

How many of us set out to do our ‘million stroke journey’: to challenge ourselves so completely that we forget what our comfort zone is?

I don’t know what my threshold is. I do know that every now and again, the challenges in the workplace can create ideal experiences to learn more about myself – and if I know that, then perhaps I can use Roz Savage’s example to be more effective as a leader to others.

Why Job Descriptions Matter

One of the challenges for HR is preparing job descriptions that are effective in addressing the strategic needs of the organization and linking this to the outcomes expected of any particular position.

Somehow we seem to have separated the job from the organization in such a way that we describe the focus of the organization in strategic terms but describe jobs by reference to the tasks they perform. Managers have clearly decided that the best way to control the workforce is to describe jobs in this way and this has been aided and assisted by HR departments.

Interestingly, of course, the position descriptor then becomes fairly useless as a reference point for performance development and management. Most people are capable of demonstrating that they can easily undertake the tasks in the position descriptor since these are usually set in such a way that they describe what the job used to do, not what it needs to do. Sadly, someone who can’t do the tasks assigned to them is probably not going to benefit from any performance development process.

Position descriptors need to be outcome focused and linked directly to the areas of accountability in a strategic or business plan.

I recently reviewed and rewrote a set of position descriptors for a large service sector organization that had used a very traditional task description system that categorized activities according to whether they were performed daily, weekly, monthly or occasionally, and the percentage of time to be spent on each task group.

Not surprisingly, this agency experienced a high degree of turnover from staff whose commitment and loyalty to the organization was affected by a high level of control and what they also perceived to be a lack of trust.

By changing the description of the roles to reflect the strategic nature of the position, and through developing a strong link between the successful achievement of position outcomes and organizational success, we were able to reduce turnover and improve morale.

This change was only possible because the CEO recognized the benefit of doing something different and being prepared to adopt a practical and relatively easy to use system. A similar approach has been adopted by another service sector organization and is being implemented within an expanding resource sector operation.

Every organization sets out to establish a performance culture and attempts to reinforce this through a management and development system.

We need to understand that when we recruit people or promote them, we are usually looking to match their capability and potential with the future needs of the organization. To limit this possibility by inappropriate job descriptions is to deny the organization – and the individual – of realizing the full impact of their talents and contribution.

HR owes both parties a better deal.

What do you think?

This article was written for Human Resources IQ.