Last weeks blog led to a pertinent comment from one of our readers reflecting on the role of BP’s leadership and management in the build up to the spill crisis. This led us to contemplate the differences between leadership and management and whether this distinction serves any purpose? Could this distinction allow leaders to play a blame game or does it actually enhance the running of the company? Traditionally the difference is described as “Leaders do the right things, managers do things right”. There is a large body of writing on the topic and we will not attempt to delve into the depths of academic rigor in this post, but rather try to stimulate some thought in this regard around the BP issue.
When CEO Tony Hayward took over as leader of BP he stressed that safety was his number one priority and was focussed on driving an improvement in the operational safety of their business following some serious incidents. One could argue that Tony Hayward was “doing the right things”.
We assume for our discussion that risk management was on the leadership teams agenda and that deep water drilling was seen as high risk.
Given that the deep water drilling risk materialised and was not mitigated by the plans put in place we need to consider if this failure can be ascribed to a leadership or a management failure. Conventional wisdom would imply that it is the leaders role to make sure there is adequate risk assessment and risk mitigation (i.e. reduce to an acceptable level) for major risks that could affect the company’s future, human lives or the environment. However is it the leaders role to know the absolute detail of each and every risk mitigation? Is this not where the management role fits in?
It would be reasonable to expect that the manager of the business unit under which the well was being drilled must ensure that any risk mitigation assurance given (to leaders) is both comprehensive and correctly implemented. The Deepwater Horizon incident would indicate that the Blow Out Protector valve (BOP) was the last line of defense that the leadership was assured it was fail-safe. Events show us this so called fail-safe option had been impinged by a) local decisions apparently based on costs affecting it’s fallibility; b) feedback from contractors and workers that there were failures occurring that were not in line with expectations that were ignored; c) and time pressures to make progress before the looming hurricane season. The mitigation plans were thus weakened by local “management” implementation decisions - i.e “not doing things right”.
Some would argue that the leader role ends with having done the right things i.e. “it was managements failure”. Other would argue that surely the leaders responsibility covers not only setting out the right things to be done but also ensuring that implementation is “done right”.
Being able to rely on your leadership team to utilize their management skills correctly and do the right thing is absolutely vital and great leaders will spend much of their time’ in building the right team with the right set of skills.
Are leaders off the hook if they have done the right things? Are managers managers and leaders leaders and never the twain shall meet? Is the distinction between leadership and management useful only in so far as it allows for identification of the skill set? Is Tony Hayward off the hook for the catastrophe that has taken place?
What do you think?
Lessons
- leadership and management should exist as an interrelated set of skills within every leader.
- leaders rely on their subordinates to implement correctly to give affect to strategy.
- the leader needs to ensure that assurances provided are robust.
- when changing existing culture extra focus and effort is required from the leader.
- leaders accountability encompasses direction through to delivery