Leadership Vs. Management | Inspire Your Team

How to Inspire Great Work

It is an unfortunate misconception that the words leader and manager can be used interchangeably.

In a professional setting, those in management positions are often looked to for leadership but not always do managers live up to being great leaders.

If you’re familiar with John C. Maxwell’s take on the 5 Levels of Leadership or if you have management experience, you know that being assigned to a management or positional-leadership role is the lowest level of leadership.

This kind of leadership is not considered low because it undesirable but rather because it has the least amount of influence on the group that requires direction.

In most situations positional-leadership is where we get our start, great leaders however build upon positional-leadership to develop genuine relationships with their employees.

From these relationships, trust is formed and leaders are freed from relaying solely on superficial motivational tactics like incentive pay, benefit packages, and the like to motivate their teams to produce great work.

Leadership based on trust is capable of inspiring great work rather than a manager having to demand it.

Zach Mercurio compares these motivational tactics to the inefficient act of pushing a heavy object rather than the much more energy efficient means of pulling the same object in his Switch & Shift article, “When Motivation Isn’t Enough: Inspire Employees to Strive.”

Mercurio continues his comparison by saying that being able to inspire employees is how true leadership is carried out. He makes the case that inspirational leadership, rather than a manager pushing their employees, is equivalent to the more energy efficient pulling of a heavy object.

Of course, instead of pulling a heavy object the leader is pulling their team towards success.

Mercurio’s concept of pull-leadership over push-managing gives a vivid image that leadership is to be done out in front, for the whole team to see.

A leader can’t just tell her team what to do if she expects to help the team be successful. If a leader is going to inspire her followers to accomplish great things, she must be the example of how the team will need to work and carry themselves in order to be successful.

As for how to establish those relationships, transparency is key. Joe Plumeri, the man responsible for the Sears Tower becoming Willis Tower, recommends being yourself and being forthright.

Just because you’ve been thrust into a leadership role doesn’t mean the real you now needs to be hid from the world. In fact, any sense by your team that you are being disingenuous may hurt your ability to form that important team bond.

Mercurio encourages making your organization’s work a calling. It needs to be communicated to your team that the work they do is a single component in a chain of events that serves someone else. In doing so, each person’s work becomes greater than themselves and contributes to something greater than the organization.

By having that shared vision, no longer will the roles on your team be filled by people who are simply there for the pay-check or the job title they need to qualify for the job they really want. Instead, the work of each person is guided by the inspiration to do better than they did yesterday and to make a valuable contribution to the big picture.