Many people confuse leadership with management. In this blog post on Management and Leadership rom HBR, John Kotter shares his frustration with this confusion It is important to know the difference particularly if you are a manager and you want to be a leader.
Leadership is essential for defining the right thing to do and management is critical to getting things done well. There are many great leaders who are not great managers and vice versa.
I have seen far too many instances of a good manager coming up with a great plan and executing it but all for not, since the feature added was of little value or did not meet the customers needs. Basically the manager did the wrong thing very well. Now, you could argue that they did their job and it was the leaders, the other guys, who did their job incorrectly. True perhaps but its a bit hollow given the wasted development effort.
If you find yourself in this position, that is, doing the wrong thing, you need to find the internal fortitude to speak up and to work toward a solution that makes sense. It may be hard, it may be challenging but it is what a leader would do.
Keep in mind this phrase that a wise man once told me "a poorly executed brilliant plan is vastly superior to a brilliantly executed poor plan".
