Is Leadership and Management the same thing?

These terms are often used interchangeably but they really are distinct and very different.

• Leadership is about creating a vision and strategy which inspires and attracts Followers. 
• Management is the process of taking action to achieve results.

Every organisation needs Followers who can be clients, citizens, students, patients or anyone else defined as your audience. And you attract Followers by being a “Thought Leader” - someone with a unique viewpoint which makes you stand out from the crowd. 

But attracting Followers is the first step; you really want to create Advocates who continue to follow you and spread the word, because this attracts even more Followers.

Leadership must be woven into the fabric of an organisation, because it covers everything from how you create the environment to attract the brightest talent, to the way you develop products and services and how you describe and communicate these to your audience.

Some Leaders also have the capacity to be great Managers, but are the best Leaders really good at the detailed stuff? Some are, but the best of the best know what they are good at and they leave the detail to others. They delegate and make it their primary goal to attract Followers - or at least they should!

Maybe we need a new metric of performance, a new KPI called the Fi or Follower Index? It may sound slightly odd but that's the basis on which many businesses were built. In the dot-com era that I was intimately involved in, it was all about attracting 'eyeballs'. Maybe it wasn't such a crazy idea after all!