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The latest content on working effectively with others and developing your own leadership capability. 

Collaboration and Leadership

The latest content on working effectively with others and developing your own leadership capability.

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The Leadership and Management Development Newsletter

Teamwork allows us to engage in important work, and teams hold immense power. Those on teams share perspectives, brainstorm ideas, and produce results beyond what’s possible alone.

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Teamwork in Talent Development

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Are You Giving Current Employees Room to Move? 

Bold vs. Cautious Leadership—Which Is the Best for Growth?

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Conscious Accountability

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Setting Up a Project Team for Success

Building Psychological Safety Into Leadership Development

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What to Do When You Disagree About “Facts”

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“What’s the difference between leadership and management?” "Ha,” you might think, “that’s easy”:You manage things but lead people.Anyone can learn to manage, but real leaders are born.Leadership is getting people to do what they don’t want to do. Each of these dances around the concepts, but don’t truly hit the mark. Let’s take them in reverse order. Leadership is getting people to do what they don’t want to do.This one is close—often, leaders must get their people to do undesired or unpleasant things. But this is just a piece of leadership—motivation, specifically. Anyone can learn to manage, but real leaders are born.This is the classic struggle between “trait theory” and “behavioral theory,” the question of whether people are born leaders or if leadership can be learned. Let’s cut through the noise, shall we? Leadership can be learned. After all, if leadership is based on the traits you’re born with, what’s the point of spending billions of dollars on leadership development programs every year? What’s with all that science and those books and magazine articles? Do the traits we’re born with determine our leadership potential? No, but they influence it. Sure, being intelligent, brave, and well-spoken are examples of traits that help you become a better leader. But they’re not mandatory. And how many leaders have you known who are too smart for their own good (“intelligent”), foolhardy (“brave”), and who are all talk and no action (“well-spoken”)? Traits, undisciplined by leadership behaviors, can hurt your leadership ability. You manage things but lead people.This one is a classic. And it is dead wrong! The implication here is that management is a way to control objects, processes, projects, and so forth. That part is right. But it’s also very true that people are managed. There is even a job title for people who do this: managers! Leadership—the interpersonal kind—is considered one of the functions of being a manager. However, it’s a limited way of looking at leadership and management, as if we happily chug along managing our responsibilities until we need to pull out some leadership in dealing with our people. No, it’s much more fluid than that, a lot more challenging, and a lot more fun.All right, so what is a good distinction between leadership and management? As things unfold in this article, you’ll see why this one works:Management is keeping things on track. Leadership is going someplace new.Let’s look at these two ideas and see how they’re different.Management is keeping things on track. Back in the day, railroad engines ran on steam. In the early days, they got that steam by burning wood in a furnace that, in turn, heated water, which created the steam that powered the engine. In the cabin was a conductor who drove the train, and a “fireman” responsible for keeping the furnace stoked with wood. He was also required to keep an eye on the pressure gauge, ensuring it didn’t get too high (and explode) or too low (the train would slow down or even stop). The fireman managed the furnace/boiler to ensure it ran correctly and knew what adjustments to make to keep it that way. Leadership is going someplace new. Let’s stay with trains for this one. Have you ever flown with Southern Pacific Airways? Or Baltimore-Ohio Air? Of course not. You can’t; they don’t exist. But trains used to be the fastest way for passengers to travel around the country. (Southern Pacific and Baltimore-Ohio were passenger train companies.) Not anymore, of course. And when passenger plane service was introduced, it was with new companies. Why not train companies? Why didn’t they introduce air travel so they could keep their valuable (and lucrative) passenger service? Because they saw themselves as train companies. But what if, instead, they had the foresight to imagine themselves in the people-moving business? It would have been natural for them to upgrade their technology (from trains to planes) to stay in the business of passenger travel. Instead, a lack of leadership—the ability to go someplace new—took them completely out of that business. (The passenger train business was completely wiped out, reduced to one publicly subsidized company—Amtrak—operating at a loss each year. And don’t even get me started on how the long-range bus companies suffered the same fate!) Leadership could have brought them into the future. Instead, a lack of leadership (and a key component of it: vision) took them out…for good.So, you manage people and lead them on an interpersonal level. Organizations require strategic leadership to guide them into the future. Which are you (and will you be)? Hopefully, both!

Classic Distinctions Between Leadership and Management—Why They’re Wrong

Martin Luther King Jr. was many things, but few would see him as a great model for business leaders.King exemplifies two types of organizational leadership vital to today’s business environment, according to Christopher Neck, associate professor of management at Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business, and his colleague Jeffrey Godwin of Saint Vincent College. They argue that King was a transformational and servant leader, and enterprises today would benefit greatly from adopting his techniques.When Neck and Godwin started using King as an example of leadership in class, their categorizations differed—Neck saw him as a servant leader, and Godwin saw him as a transformational leader.Transformational leaders articulate a vision, while servant leaders believe in empowering and developing people on an individual level. Both types of leaders aim to empower employees and improve performance, but the transformational leader focuses more on the organization as a whole, while the servant leader focuses more on individuals. Both paths lead to the same goal, and in the end, the two types have more commonalities than differences, Neck says. “If you care about employees first, they will work harder, and their performance will improve. At the end of the day, it’s all about the organization.”In his research on King, Neck found examples of both types of leadership. King had a vision and set a model for followers to emulate. His expectations were high, and he challenged people about their assumptions. But he was also patient, advocating nonviolence and cooperation. He promoted equality and fairness and helped individuals believe in themselves, realizing that personal motivation was the key to social change.In research published in the Journal of Leadership and Management, Neck and Godwin examined a particular phase of King’s career: the “Chicago Campaign” of 1966. To end housing discrimination in the area, King moved into an apartment in the city’s west-side slums and began working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO).In August 1966, King led about 700 people in a protest march through all-white neighborhoods in Chicago. Angry residents gathered, but King was not deterred. Working with the SCLC and the CCCO, he planned another march, this time in the white, middle-class suburb of Cicero. Worried town leaders met with King and other civil rights leaders to discuss the march. The civil rights groups agreed to cancel the march, and in exchange, the city promised to guarantee accessible housing to African Americans.City leaders, for the most part, failed to follow through on the pact. King, though bitterly disappointed and angry, was not a short-term thinker.“It was one cog in his strategy to bring attention to his vision,” Neck says. “Even if the organizational outcome failed, he didn’t fail from a servant leader perspective. He helped people believe in themselves. He brought people together and brought attention to achieving equal education and facilities.”Though the business world has changed tremendously since King’s day, his leadership style is more relevant than ever.In the past, workers often stayed with a company for 20 or 30 years, and authoritarian leadership was the norm. In today’s fast-paced business environment, “it would be hard for an autocratic, top-down leader to survive,” Neck says. The pension carrot is gone. Frequent job change is the norm, and employers have a tough time finding and retaining skilled workers. Routine tasks are automated, and high-performance expectations are the norm. Employees accept the pressure, but only if they feel their work is valued and has meaning.A transformational leader provides a vision that inspires workers to come together and rise to challenges. A servant leader empowers them to use their best skills and make independent decisions that ultimately benefit the entire company.

Martin Luther King Jr.: A Leader to Inspire Businesses

I once had a nurse manager come to me and ask, “How do I tell a master’s-prepared registered nurse that sleeping at their workstation is unprofessional? In many of my previous management jobs, finding an employee sleeping at their workstation was a fireable offense. In this environment, the employee appears to see no difference between sleeping in a designated break room and sleeping at their workstation.”While it may not always be an employee sleeping on the job, managers in all sectors need to address a variety of unacceptable behaviors. But how can you do so without causing drama?When I ask people what feeling comes to mind when I use the phrases “talk about a problem” or “address an issue,” the most common response is “Ugh!” – which isn’t really an emotion, but you probably get the idea. So, first tip: recognize this as a simple gap between what you were expecting and what you are observing. Your job as their manager is to describe the gap and partner with the person to close it. Here are three suggestions for how to do that:Master Your StoryYou will be far more effective at holding this conversation if you can suspend judgement. For example, even if you believe everyone should know that sleeping at the workstation is unprofessional, hold open the possibility that maybe this person was trained or taught differently. Or maybe, just maybe, they slept at their workstation all through school and no one ever got up the courage to give them feedback about it. After all, it is easy to mistake silence for approval.Catch It EarlyThe time to talk about the bad behavior is the first or second time it happens. Imagine how easy it would be, the first time a new employee falls asleep at their workstation, to gently shake them awake and kindly say, “We want all our nurses to sleep in the breakroom, not their station. Let me show you where it is.” When you catch it early, you are kindly onboarding a new employee and making sure they know what they need to be successful.When you let the poor behavior go on for a while without addressing it, two things happen. First, your own irritation likely builds, fueling your negative story. Second, you make the issue bigger. Now it is not just once or twice that this has happened but months’ worth of bad behavior. When you make the issue bigger through delay, you are more likely to create embarrassment and subsequent defensiveness in the other person.Have and Share a Good IntentIf you use the first two tips, it will be much easier to use the third one. Before any gap conversation, stop and ask yourself: what do I really want for this person? For them, not from them. Asking and answering this question will require you to flip your perspective 180 degrees. After all, we step up to gap conversations because the gap is causing a pain or problem for us. We are acutely aware of how their behavior is affecting us. The question you must ask is: How is it affecting them?What do you want for them and how will sharing this help? It can be as simple as, “I want you to be successful here and that is why I want to talk to you about this.”When you care about someone, and they know you care about them, gap conversations become about improvement, not reproof.

3 Tips for Addressing Unacceptable Behavior in the Workplace

Here are four ways in which managers can let personality differences get in the way of performance—and what they can do about it.

Don't Let Personality Differences Get in the Way of Performance

Would you say leaders in your organization tend to be more bold or more cautious when they make important decisions? Not sure? Here are a couple case studies for comparison.Case Study 1:A new CEO took the helm at a technology company and quickly eliminated 70 percent of the product line and announced a partnership with the company’s biggest rival.Case Study 2:At a different technology company, a new CEO was promoted from within, and instead of making bold changes, the CEO began methodically tuning the company culture and carefully analyzing trends and opportunities to refine the directional focus.AnalysisOn the surface, these case studies represent opposite leadership styles, one bold and one cautious. Which would you want to train for in your organization? Is it better to train leaders to measure twice or to teach them that fortune favors the bold?While they appear to be in conflict, caution and courage are both virtues. Knowing the outcomes of each case study adds some useful context.Case Study 1 describes the return of Steve Jobs to Apple in 1997. Jobs made the risky decision to focus on a few products like the iMac and formed a partnership with Microsoft to bring Microsoft Office software to Mac machines. Apple experienced extraordinary growth under Jobs’ second tenure.Case Study 2 describes the promotion of Satya Nadella to the top job at Microsoft. The company was struggling when he took over in 2014 and seemed to be on the fast track to irrelevance. Under his leadership, though, Microsoft has traded places with Apple as the world’s most valuable technology company.Effective Leaders Need Both Caution and CourageThe apparent contrast between courage and caution in these examples reveals a paradox, a tension between two necessary principles that on the surface appear to be contradictory. It’s tempting to dumb down the contrast and talk about different “leadership styles”—one bold, and one cautious, either of which can be effective. This explanation ignores the important reality that every effective leader needs both caution and courage. The traits are like two posts on a suspension bridge pulling in opposite directions. The tension between them is what keeps the bridge in place. For all his caution, Nadela placed big bets on AI, cloud services, mixed reality, and quantum computing. Some of those bets have not yet paid off. For all his boldness, Jobs was intensely data-driven in his obsession with the user experience, not just measuring twice, but hundreds of times and from multiple angles.Both Nadela and Jobs had big aspirational goals that, like a compass, pointed them in the direction they wanted to go. Jobs wanted to fundamentally reshape the way people use technology to create, interact, and find meaning. Nadela has a similar vision for Microsoft that is about empowering every individual and organization to achieve more by leveraging technology. Both leaders also knew they needed short-term achievable goals to measure progress toward those aspirational compass points.The Balance of Courage and CautionTo train effective leaders, you need to help them understand the balance between aspirational goals and achievable goals. They need to understand that all lasting progress is the result of an iterative process of goal setting, barrier analysis, behavior changing, and results evaluation. At Niche Academy, we call this the Progress Cycle.Effective leaders are not born. They are ordinary people who have come to understand and value paradoxes like the tension between courage and caution. Chances are that your team already has people ready to learn and implement the patterns that will move their team forward.

At the 2024 ATD Org Dev conference, we used the SAFE framework to discuss how leadership development can significantly improve organizational psychological safety. 

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