Many individuals confuse leadership and management. While I get the two are similar, leadership requires something different from you.
What if I'm a Senior Executive of a company; is that considered leadership?
While you may have the technical title of a leader, based on the hierarchy of your organization, having a title does not necessarily mean that you are a leader.
What if I founded a small business and hired employees; does meet the qualification of leadership?
Again, founding your small business is wonderful but it does not automatically qualify you as a leader. You may be a good manager, but not a leader.
I hear your outcry's already. You manage and are accountable for employees as a daily part of your role. You may even be responsible for a significant P & L. However, what you do every day in your organization may not be considered leadership.
What is leadership?
There are so many definitions of leadership and there are so many different types of leadership styles. Ultimately, leadership influences. Leadership is a one to many relationships. Leadership engages and motivates. Leadership achieves organizational goals.
Therefore, leadership influences individuals (the team, the department, the organization) to achieve organizational goals.
What is management?
Management requires that you work with the team to get the work done. It may require planning, coordinating, delegating, managing schedules and resources, managing performance, providing coaching, developing your staff, and so much more.
As management, rewards, and threats influence your employees' behaviors to achieve performance goals. If an employee consistently performs and they are on a bonus system, they are not performing because you are a great leader but more so to get the reward. If an employee consistently shows up late to work daily and is threatened with disciplinary action and their behavior improves, their behavior didn't improve because of your leadership skills but because of the threat of losing their job.
The difference between leadership and management is that leadership has followers. They naturally gravitate to you and follow your directives. You don't have to command action from them, that's management, leadership simply influences in a way that inspires others to work hard and want to participate in achieving the organizational goals. In addition, leadership sets the stage, provides the direction and guides employees down that path.
The Solution
Now that you have a clear understanding of the difference between leadership and management, let's look at ways that you can build your leadership skills. Our jobs as leaders are to inspire, motivate, engage and develop our staff to achieve exceptional performance. To do so requires us to assess how we show up as leaders in our organizations. Our DiSC Work of Leaders® profile is a foundational tool to help you assess your leadership skills.
Our Everything DiSC Work of Leaders® profile is broken down into three parts: vision, alignment, and execution. The Everything DiSC Work of Leaders® Profile will help you find your DiSC personality type and learn how to approach these three essential components of leadership.
The Everything DiSC Work of Leaders® Profile is a little different from other DiSC® profiles. Most of the other DiSC profiles report focuses on understanding the differences between people. The Everything DiSC Work of Leaders® Profile focuses on understanding how your preferences and behavior impact your effectiveness in certain leadership situations. Everything DiSC Work of Leaders® Profile approaches leadership as a one-to-many relationship, instead of the one-to-one relationship that you have in management.
The assessment will connect you to real-world demands. You will be encouraged to understand your leadership behaviors and how they impact your effectiveness. Your profile will also help you start some thought-provoking conversations, and will offer a fresh perspective regardless of your prior knowledge or experience as a leader. It will be an opportunity for leaders at any level to reflect on how they approach their work, their team, and their organization.
Your report will help you act on the information you have been given, and also what you have discovered about yourself. You will be offered strategies and tips that are clear and easy to apply, as well as, specific feedback that can show you how things can play out in the real world.
The Everything DiSC Work of Leaders® Profile will explain the "vision, alignment, and execution " process in depth, and give you the steps required to follow through with it. There are several pages dedicated to each of these steps providing you with a comprehensive understanding of being a leader.
Once you have gone through the DiSC Work of Leaders process: vision, alignment, and execution, you will then review your strengths and weaknesses as they relate to each step in the process. You will be provided with tips for improvement in each area of weakness, and even provide real-life examples of how the tips can be used in different situations. You will be asked reflective questions at the end of each section, which will allow you to think about how your personal behavior directly impacts your team and organization.
The Everything DiSC Work of Leaders® Profile allows you to take a holistic view of your DiSC personality type and connect that with the leadership strategies of “vision, alignment, and execution.” This assessment will give you extremely valuable skills that will enhance your leadership, no matter what level you are currently at.