Exercise: Management & Leadership – Stage I

Is there a difference between Management and Leadership? And if yes, which of the two is better? Or is that the wrong question?

I use these questions when mentoring talents on their path to a leadership position. I think that also experienced managers may benefit from this self-paced task.

This exercise goes of course deeper and further in a personal dialogue, but there are some marks on this path which may be helpful for you if you want to work on your answers on your own.

Allow me to start with bad news:

• there is no precise answer
• you will not get my answer here
• the discussion following such questions will hardly ever end, but it needs to start

And you can start now: I would like to invite you to a practical and individual exercise, for which you should reserve a few free pages in your Travel Journal.

For the period for the next two to four weeks I ask you to write down words and thoughts under each headline. Which behaviour or topic do you associate with Management, which with Leadership? These key words can be technical, like “delegation” or more abstract, like “trust”. It can be a sensation like “busyness” or an activity like “listen”. But I don’t want to influence you any further, this is going to be your collection. Only one more task: nothing in between, put your thought either under Management or Leadership.

Before you move on to the next stage, I recommend to keep the list growing for a while. Throughout the next weeks you will come across various situations which provide you input. This can be a discussion with colleagues or your manager, or maybe you read something in a book or on LinkedIn that catches your interest. There is no rush, and the more you write down the better (however if you have less than one hundred key words, you are not done yet…).

Then, after a couple of weeks and three or four pages later, you move on to stage II. See you there.