What is the difference between a manager and a leader? A common response is that a manager tells you what to do while a leader shows you what to do. I prefer to define it differently. Managers navigate the day-to-day complexities inside a business, ensuring that systems and processes are being adhered to, while leaders drive change: change in direction, change in mindset and change in human behaviour.

It’s often thought that leadership and management are carried out by two different people. Yet leaders and managers are usually the same person doing different things at different times. It’s just a matter of which hat they put on. Sometimes one must navigate the day-to-day complexity and sometimes one needs to drive change. Sometimes it’s the manager hat, and sometimes it’s the leadership hat.

Sometimes the goal is to coach, motivate and inspire team members. The practices that require those skills are ‘levers of influence’. This is the leadership hat. At other times, it’s about planning, organising, staffing, and directing. Those practices are ‘levers of control’. This is the management hat.

One thing’s for sure: different hats yield very different outcomes. So, how can managers learn which hat to wear – and which levers to use – when?

Lever of Influence: Being an Effective Coach

The first practice of a top-performing manager is to be an effective coach, and an important element in effective coaching is adaptive communication. People learn in different ways and for your coaching to stick, be sure you’re adapting your communication style to your team members’ learning style.

Ask each team member, ‘How are you most comfortable learning?’ If someone is a hands-on learner, coproduce with them for a little while and demonstrate how to do things effectively. If a team member learns by listening, audiobooks can help their performance. If the style is visual, task or workflow charts are a good approach. It comes down to asking questions and really listening to the answers.

Effective coaches also influence future performance. Top-performing managers help team members realise they can do better tomorrow than they did yesterday. Use past performance as a reference point, then provide actionable feedback to positively influence and impact future performance.

Feedback should have a time frame and contain very specific guidance that an individual can immediately incorporate. What do you want that team member to focus on? What actions should they take to improve performance? Does the person you’re coaching agree with the actions? Gaining their buy-in to take certain steps is a key process in influencing behaviour.

Lever of Control: Being KPI-Focused and Accountable to Results

KPI-focused managers align their actions and decisions with key metrics like revenue, quality and productivity. They monitor progress and adjust strategy as needed to improve performance. Good KPIs align individual and team efforts with organisational goals, which helps the team prioritise tasks and the manager allocate resources effectively.

Measuring creates focus. Giving people daily KPIs that roll up to weekly and monthly KPIs creates a performance-focussed team where no one needs to wonder if they had a productive day. Limiting these KPIs to between one and three means you’re shining a light on the most critical metrics. KPIs should also be available and easy to find, so that individual team members can act on them.

If a team is missing attainable KPIs, the manager should ask three specific target-based questions:

1. What are the primary reasons we’re missing the target?
2. What actions will be taken to get back on target?
3. By what date will we be back on target?

This requires teams to clearly articulate the problem and empowers them to build out a strategy and time frame for improving results. Being KPI-focused and accountable creates a culture that values high-performing teams.

Lever of Influence and Control: Leading with a Team Vision Statement

Just as an entire organisation needs a vision statement, so does each individual department within the business. A team vision statement is much more specific about the choices that the team makes, the expected behaviours and the desired mindset. This creates alignment around common goals for that part of the organisation.

Manager-leaders don’t write a vision statement in a vacuum. They involve their team. Hold a group brainstorming session on questions such as, ‘What do we want to accomplish?’ ‘How do we win?’ ‘What do we want to become?’ By working with your team to write a vision statement, you’ll get full buy-in on that vision, and your team members will take ownership of the results.

Balancing Influence and Control

Influence without control can lead to chaos, while control without influence can create a rigid and uninspiring environment. The art of successful management lives in finding the right balance between these two very different levers – learning which hat to wear, and when.

Brian Gottlieb is the author of Beyond the Hammer: A Fresh Approach to Leadership, Culture, and Building High Performance Teams