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Leading - Managing - Doing: The Other Balancing Act

Submitted by mikeb on Mon, 11/22/2010 - 09:39

After volunteering to help Candice with peer coaching, I suggested we have a suggestion on leading, managing and doing. Balancing these three things is important for anyone but especially anyone wanting lead more rather than simply do more.

The first part is understanding the difference between leading and managing. Leading is getting people aligned towards a common goal or purpose. It includes looking at the future, envisioning change and preparing others to work with you. Managing really comes down to resource management to accomplish tasks or jobs. If you are organizing people, money, equipment or other things in order to complete a job, then you are managing. Doing is of course the work itself.
With that understanding, you then break down how you spend your time doing these three things into percentages. If you are a lead programmer, you might be 20% leading, 20% managing, and 60% doing. If you are the director of an IT department, you would likely have these numbers flip-flopped around with 60% leading, 20% managing, and 20% doing. The point of the exercise though is to identify if this balance is really the one you want or really the one you should have.
A director who should be leading more but instead is managing more might realize he or she needs to let go of tasks more readily for her staff to complete on their own. A lead programmer might decide to spend more time leading other programmers than doing actual coding himself. Another person might even realize that they want to do a completely different job with a different balance than they currently have. The leading, managing, doing analysis is a good one for anyone to do on a regular basis.
Are you really spending your time where you should or where you want?

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