- Managing and leading are two different jobs, and a team needs both. Managing runs the work that is already defined; leading moves people toward something that is not settled yet.
- The problem is rarely a manager who cannot lead. It is a manager who leads when things are calm and falls back on checking and approving the moment things get uncertain.
- Promotion rewards the wrong skills. In a study of 131 US firms, the best salespeople were the most likely to be promoted, and their new teams sold less.
- Control buys compliance, not commitment. People do what is checked and stop offering what is not asked for.
- Five moves make the shift, starting with noticing when you reach for control and asking whether it helps the team or only calms you.
Most managers are promoted for being good at the work. Then the work changes, and the habits that earned the promotion start getting in the way. Managing is running work that is already defined: plans, budgets, roles and checking results against them. Leading is moving people toward something that is not settled yet: setting a direction, getting people behind it and keeping them committed while the answers are still unclear.
Across the leadership programs we have run since 2019, the pattern that comes up most often is not a manager who cannot lead. It is a manager who leads well when things are calm and retreats into checking, approving and redoing other people's work as soon as things get uncertain.
This article sets out the difference between a manager and a leader, explains why new leaders retreat into control, shows what that control costs a team and gives five moves for making the shift. It also looks at how the shift plays out in Kenyan organizations and at three common mistakes.
The Difference Between a Manager and a Leader
The debate is older than most of the people having it. In 1977 Abraham Zaleznik argued in Harvard Business Review that managers and leaders are different kinds of people: managers seek order and stability, leaders seek change. That framing is still the one most people carry, and it is the least useful, because it turns a set of activities into a personality type.
John Kotter's answer, in his HBR article "What Leaders Really Do", is more practical. "Management is about coping with complexity," he wrote. "Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change." He then paired the main activities of each:
| Task | Managing | Leading |
|---|---|---|
| What it copes with | Complexity: keeping a large operation running predictably | Change: moving the operation somewhere new |
| Deciding where to go | Planning and budgeting: targets, detailed steps and resources | Setting a direction: a picture of the future and the strategy to reach it |
| Getting people organized | Organizing and staffing: structure, jobs and delegated responsibility | Aligning people: communicating the direction until people understand and commit to it |
| Keeping it on track | Controlling and problem solving: monitoring results against the plan and fixing deviations | Motivating and inspiring: helping people get past the barriers that change puts in their way |
Read across any row and the two columns are not rivals. A team with a direction but no plan goes nowhere in particular; a team with a plan but no direction executes last year's strategy very efficiently. The question for a new leader is not which one they are. It is which one the situation in front of them needs, and whether they can switch.
John Kotter argued in Harvard Business Review that leadership is "not necessarily better than management or a replacement for it." His diagnosis was that most US corporations were "overmanaged and underled." The fix he proposed was adding leadership capacity, not removing management, which is why the useful question is balance rather than identity.
Source: Harvard Business Review, John P. Kotter, What Leaders Really Do
Why New Leaders Retreat Into Control
If both jobs matter, why do so many people promoted into leadership roles keep doing only the first one? Three forces push them back.
They were promoted for doing the work
Most promotions reward performance in the current job, and the current job is usually not leading. Researchers Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue tested this using data on 38,843 sales workers at 131 US firms between 2005 and 2011, 1,553 of whom were promoted to manager. Published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2019, the study found that firms promoted their best salespeople ahead of colleagues with more managerial potential. Those promotions came at a cost. Each doubling of a new manager's own sales before promotion was linked to a 6.1% fall in the sales of each person they went on to manage.
The skill that wins the promotion is doing the work yourself. Under pressure, it is the skill a new manager reaches for first.
Uncertainty triggers control
The pull toward control under pressure is well documented. In a 1981 review in Administrative Science Quarterly, Barry Staw, Lance Sandelands and Jane Dutton gathered evidence on how individuals, groups and organizations respond to threat. They found the same pattern at every level: under threat, the information people take in narrows, and control is tightened and pulled to the center. They called it the threat-rigidity effect.
For a manager, that looks like more approvals, more status meetings, more reports and less room for anyone else to decide. Each step feels responsible. Together they shut out the information and judgment the manager needs most at exactly the moment they need it.
Control feels productive
Checking produces visible activity. A full calendar of reviews feels like progress in a way that waiting for someone else to solve a problem does not. It also protects the manager: if every decision passes through them, nobody can say they were not on top of it. The trouble is that the team learns the same lesson. If every decision goes up, nobody below the manager needs to think about the decision, and soon nobody does. The manager then has evidence that the team cannot be trusted with more, and the cycle tightens. More meetings, more approvals and more check-ins feel like leadership under pressure. They are management turned up to full volume.
Benson, Li and Shue estimated that a promotion policy built around managerial potential, rather than sales results, would raise average managerial quality by 30%. They suggest firms may accept that loss because promotion is how they reward top performers. A promotion is a prize and an appointment, and organizations rarely notice they are using one decision for both.
Source: Quarterly Journal of Economics, Benson, Li and Shue, Promotions and the Peter Principle
What Control Costs a Team
Control is not wrong. Some work needs tight checks: payments, safety, regulatory filings. The cost comes when control becomes the default response to anything uncertain, because control and commitment produce different kinds of effort:
- Compliance means people do what they are asked, to the standard that will be checked, and no more.
- Commitment means people treat the goal as their own: they raise problems early, offer ideas nobody asked for and keep going when nobody is watching.
Compliance is enough for routine work. It is not enough for change, because change depends on people noticing what the plan missed and saying so. Control can get people to do what you ask. It cannot get them to tell you what you did not know to ask.
Edward Deci, James Connell and Richard Ryan studied 23 managers and their staff at a major corporation. Managers who supported their staff's sense of choice, rather than controlling their behavior, had staff with more positive views of their work. Training made the managers more supportive, though its effect on staff was less conclusive: one workshop does not change a team.
Source: Journal of Applied Psychology, Deci, Connell and Ryan, Self-Determination in a Work Organization
Drawing on earlier research, the same authors named three conditions that support people's sense of choice at work: giving real choices, giving feedback that informs rather than controls, and acknowledging the other person's point of view. All three are things a manager does in ordinary conversations, which is where the shift from managing to leading actually happens.
Promoting people who need to lead, not just manage?
Our Leadership and Organizational Change Management program helps new and experienced managers make the move from running the work to leading people through change, with practice on their real situations. Request a proposal.
5 Moves From Managing to Leading
None of these moves requires a new title or a change of personality. Each one is a habit, and each one is tested hardest when things are uncertain.
1. Notice the reach for control
The first move is noticing. When you find yourself adding a check-in, asking for a report or taking a task back, stop and ask one question: am I doing this because it helps the team, or because the uncertainty makes me uncomfortable? Sometimes the answer is that the team needs it. Often it is the second, and naming it is enough to choose differently.
2. Say what you don't know
Leading under uncertainty does not mean pretending to be certain. It means creating clarity where you can: what has been decided, what has not, and when it will be. A team can work with "we don't know yet, and we will decide by Friday." What it cannot work with is silence followed by a sudden instruction. Saying what you do not know also invites help: the person closest to the problem often knows something you don't, and they are far more likely to say so to a manager who has admitted the gap than to one who appears to have every answer already.
3. Set the outcome, not the method
Agree what good looks like, the limits that cannot be crossed and the deadline. Then let the person doing the work choose how. Checking the result is management; dictating every step is control.
Google's Project Oxygen analyzed more than 10,000 data points on its own managers, from performance reviews, feedback surveys and interviews. Teams with highly effective managers achieved better results, were happier and had lower turnover. Among the 10 behaviors its best managers shared, Google lists giving the team room without micromanaging, alongside having key technical skills.
Source: Google re:Work, Following the Data: The Research Behind Great Managers
4. Ask before you tell
When someone brings you a problem, ask what they think should happen before you answer. You may still decide differently, but you will learn what they see, and they will learn that their judgment is wanted. Managers who always answer first train their teams to stop thinking before they arrive.
5. Keep the management basics
Leading does not replace managing. Plans, clear roles, budgets and follow-through still matter, and a leader who drops them leaves the team inspired and disorganized. The aim is to do the basics well enough that they run without you, so your attention is free for the work that needs leading.
How the Shift Plays Out in Kenyan Organizations
The move from managing to leading is hard everywhere. In many Kenyan organizations, three local features make the retreat into control easier and harder to see.
- Promotion follows expertise and tenure. The best engineer, accountant or sales officer becomes the manager, often with no preparation for the new role. They arrive knowing the work better than anyone and are tempted to keep doing it.
- Deference feeds the control loop. Where seniority carries real weight, staff often wait to be told rather than offer a view. The manager reads the silence as a lack of initiative and checks more closely, which makes people even less likely to speak. Breaking the loop is the manager's job, because the team will not risk it first.
- Founders hand over titles before decisions. In owner-led and family businesses, professional managers are often hired to run operations while the founder still approves everything that matters. The manager learns that leading is not really expected, and manages instead.
None of these is a reason to give up on the shift. They are reasons to make it deliberately: to say out loud which decisions now belong to the team, and then to leave those decisions with them.
Three Common Manager vs Leader Mistakes
Treating leadership as a step up from management
Calling leadership the higher calling makes managers feel that planning and follow-through are beneath them. Their teams then lose the structure they depended on. Cure: treat managing and leading as two skills you switch between, and judge yourself on whether you picked the right one for the situation.
Mistaking visibility for control
More meetings and more reports make a manager feel informed, but they mostly show what people choose to put in a report. Cure: replace one standing status meeting with a short conversation about what is getting in the way, and see what you learn that the report never told you.
Waiting for certainty before leading
Some managers hold back on direction until they have all the facts. In a changing environment that moment never arrives, and the team fills the gap with guesses. Cure: give the best direction you can with what you know, say what would change it and set a date to review it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between a manager and a leader?
Managing is running work that is already defined: planning and budgeting, organizing and staffing, and controlling results against the plan. Leading is moving people toward something that is not settled yet: setting a direction, aligning people behind it and keeping them motivated through change. John Kotter summed it up as management coping with complexity and leadership coping with change.
Can a manager also be a leader?
Yes, and most roles need both. Kotter argued that leadership is not necessarily better than management or a replacement for it. The useful question is not which one you are, but which one a situation needs and whether you can switch between them.
Why do new managers struggle to lead?
They are usually promoted for doing the work well, not for leading others. A study of 131 US firms found the best salespeople were the most likely to be promoted, and their new teams sold less. Under uncertainty, people also tend to narrow the information they take in and tighten control, so new managers fall back on checking and approving.
What is the difference between compliance and commitment?
Compliance means people do what they are asked, to the standard that will be checked. Commitment means they treat the goal as their own, raise problems early and offer ideas nobody asked for. Control can produce compliance, but change depends on commitment.
How can a manager become more of a leader?
Notice when you reach for control and ask whether it helps the team or only eases your own discomfort. Say clearly what you do and do not know, set the outcome rather than the method, ask for people's views before giving your own, and keep the management basics running so your attention is free for leading.
Is micromanagement a sign of a manager rather than a leader?
It is a sign of management applied where it is not needed. Checking results is part of managing; dictating every step is control. Google's Project Oxygen found that giving the team room without micromanaging is one of the behaviors its most effective managers share.
Conclusion
The difference between a manager and a leader is not a title or a personality. It is what you do when things get uncertain. Leaders keep the management basics and still hand over the decisions their teams can make.
Think of the last time a piece of work on your team started to slip. Did you add a check-in or ask a question, and which one did your team actually need?
If you want your managers to lead through change rather than tighten their grip on it, our Leadership and Organizational Change Management program can help. Request a proposal and we will shape it around the transitions your managers are making now.
