Are you a manager or a leader? Do you know the difference? Brush up your knowledge about management and leadership using some of the finest books you can read to polish up your skills in one or the other or both. Learn just how you, too, can achieve this from the founder of Today’s Growth Consultant, a two-time Inc. 5000 designee with revenues that have doubled in each of the last 5 years. Started in 1992, the company is now an international, multimillion-dollar enterprise.
Ken is the author of the upcoming book Guerilla Marketing Today, part of the best-selling Guerilla Marketing series, and best-selling author of Online Income: Navigating the Internet Minefield and co-author with Brian Tracy of Against the Grain. He is currently working on his next book Trust Trumps Everything: Why Your Digital Footprint Determines Your Income.
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Management Or Leadership
This one’s been resonating with me. I’m trying to come up with some form of a diagnostic with our top ten, top fifteen people inside our company and I’m trying to come up with a diagnostic of, “Are they a great leader or are they a great manager?” Those two things are not the same. I’m pretty close to a comfortable tool or assessment of questions, but once I go through this and I talk to these folks, if I assess that, “That guy is a strong leader, but he needs some management help. I got a little four or five-part book reading series I want them to go through.” If I assess, “They’re an incredible manager, but they need some leadership skills. I got a list for them.”
What I want to do is I want to throw out the five books that I’m going to recommend to our team depending on what category they fall in. The first thing I want you to ask yourself is, number one, “Would you consider yourself a leader or a manager?” The manager, one, is a little bit easier. How about this one? “Do you enjoy executing? Do you enjoy having a to-do list and you wake up, you’re a little bit pumped to cross a couple of things off that list? Do you like to execute a task?” Let’s say you’re a home builder, do you love putting up the 2x4s, then the drywall, and then you love it when the carpet drops? It completes the room and you see that finishing, just that feeling of satisfaction of managing that process to completion.
A manager is in the today, a leader is in tomorrow. Click To TweetSome people know the phrase Gantt chart. A Gantt chart is a timeline with certain incremental goals along the timeline and that’s what all general contractors use. Great managers love the timeline, the execution, taking someone else’s vision, formulating a plan, and then executing the plan and then going back and saying, “Is this what you saw in your head?” Managers love the process.
Some leaders do like to manage, but leaders at the core level, they’re a little bit more visionary. You would even say they definitely have a slightly different temperament. I love the phrase, “Don’t tell me about the labor pains, just show me the baby.” Leaders, they tune out the world. They sprint ahead. They don’t look back to see who’s following them. They just charge and charge and charge knowing people are going to come behind them to help them with their aims.
Leaders have a different outlook. They’re always optimistic. They’re always looking around the corner of, “When this works, what do we add on top,” where the managers get a little bit frustrated that a leader is talking about something 90 days out. If the current project doesn’t go well, there’s no point in talking about that when we’re not there yet. A manager is in the today, a leader is in tomorrow. We’re internally doing some assessment. If I find that someone is a leader, but I can see them slipping in the areas of the management, then I’m going to suggest the following books. They’re a leader, they need some help in management and a couple of these are going to repeat.
First, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Dr. Stephen Covey, effective is the keyword in that title, Good to Great by Jim Collins, The New One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Carnegie and The Psychology of Selling by Brian Tracy. Think about this, the titles alone, if someone needs a tweak in their mindset to manage other people better, what better books than these? If you’re going to be a good manager, you better be influencing people. Then The Psychology of Selling, how important is it for a manager to sell their ideas to the people doing the meaningful work?
What if I do an assessment and I can tell, these guys are phenomenal managers, but they got a team of eight people underneath them. They need to lead. For them, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, again the book Good to Great by Jim Collins, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni, The Slight Edge, by Olson and then again The Psychology of Selling. If you haven’t read any of these, you’ve got to read them. These are non-optional ass-kicking business books that lay the foundation to be an effective manager and leader.
If you need to be a good leader, the number one undisputed leadership guru who has studied leadership for 25 years of his life is John Maxwell. The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership is a must. Good to Great by Jim Collins, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. This one will crack you up, but teach you at the same time and The Slight Edge, a very understated book.
I can’t believe more people don’t talk about it, and then of course what I believe is the bible of all business, The Psychology of Selling, because we wake up every day and start selling. We sell people on dating us. We sell people on behaving. We sell banks on loaning us money. We sell everybody everything including selling ourselves that we’re great. Why not be a great sales person? As a leader, you’re going to be leading people to your vision, which means you’re selling them on your vision. This episode is the road map to leadership and management. Take care.
Important Links:
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
- Good to Great
- The New One Minute Manager
- How to Win Friends and Influence People
- The Psychology of Selling
- The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership
- Good to Great
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
- The Slight Edge
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