The terms ‘manager’ and ‘leader’ are often used interchangeably, but the two roles are really quite different from each other. To add to the confusion, however, a management role may incorporate aspects of leadership, and vice versa. Equally, a person in a non-leadership role may exhibit true leadership qualities and become an unofficial leader in their team. So, what is the difference and why does it matter?
A veterinary manager’s role
Management involves the operational tasks of running a business, for example: building maintenance, budgeting, payroll, recruitment, and health and safety. These tasks can generally be learned but may require qualified personnel to undertake specific duties. Many of these responsibilities will of course involve highly sensitive and confidential information, so it is therefore important to appoint a manager who is suitably trained, or can be trained, in dealing with these parts of the business responsibly.
Managers are generally the people you go to when there is a specific administrative or operational issue or decision to make.
A veterinary leader’s role
Leadership can be defined as the action of leading a group of people or an organisation. Leaders build a vision of how their business should grow and inspire their team to follow that vision. Effective leaders are self-aware and model behaviour that they wish their team to emulate. This takes emotional intelligence and effective communication skills whilst fostering trust and rapport.
Successful leadership goes far beyond the mere act of delivering instructions. People are, after all, living beings with unique skills, ambitions and backgrounds. A good leader will recognise this and inspire their individual team members through methods such as coaching, active listening and empathy.
Whilst being a leader is different to being a manager, management skills may still be needed to guide the overall vision of the team and business.
Don’t management and leadership roles naturally overlap?
You’d be right in thinking that most management and leadership roles, particularly in small practices and business, end up overlapping, but this isn’t always the case. You may have an HR manager, for example, who advises and acts on personnel issues but who isn’t involved in the overall vision or direction of the business. You may also have a team member who has been asked to train a new member of the team and ends up naturally leading the new employee and having great influence over the journey of their career.
In a veterinary practice, it is not uncommon for the most senior clinician to be given the role of manager and/or a leader without truly reflecting on whether it is the best use of their time and skills. There is little more frustrating to the skilled surgeon to find that half their time now needs to be spent in an office pondering the logistics of a rota. In this instance, it would be far better to employ a separate manager who is in charge of the more operational sides to the practice.
Do high achievers naturally make the best leaders?
Is a talented employee automatically good leadership material? Not necessarily. As we’ve stated before, effective coaching takes more than merely delivering instructions. We all know highly skilled individuals who don’t necessarily have the people skills required to build trust and harmony within the team. It could be suggested that vets and vet nurses are natural empaths and therefore make emotionally intelligent leaders. But it could equally be argued that the compassion required to assess and treat a voiceless animal is wholly different to the empathy and patience needed to guide and inspire a person struggling to learn a new role.
The importance of knowing the difference
While our role may well incorporate both leadership and management, it is important to distinguish where we need to adapt our approach. Are we dealing with people or a process?
And despite the belief that there are natural born leaders, this is rarely the case. Those with innate authoritarian qualities are possibly just the most practised at these skills – whether through family roles, educational opportunities or previous employment.
But true leadership is an art and not a science. Role models could arguably be the greatest leaders of all and is something that we can all aspire to be – regardless of role, rank or tenure.
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