Lately, I have heard many who claim that they are leaders, not managers. This latest phrase du jour, which is growing popular amongst startup founders, sends shivers down my spine. How can you lead if you can’t manage, and vice versa? The Oxford Dictionary defines management as the process of dealing with or controlling things or people. If an organization is to be successful, it must be led and managed.

Specifically, the people must be led, and the goals must be managed. If you have the right people, then you won’t need to spend your time controlling them. The right people, in this case, means people who are capable and motivated to do their job. For the rest of the argument in this entry to make sense, we must make the assumption that our people are capable of doing the job that they have been hired to do and that they are motivated to do well.

All management is hard, but trivial tasks are easier to manage. Take, for example, a manager who oversees the production of widgets. Because the output of the work is tangible, he can easily manage his results and hold his team accountable for those results. For example, suppose he wants to measure the factory’s output for the day. In that case, he can set up and use a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) such as completed widgets per day and have his subordinates report to him how many widgets were created that day, a simple report with actionable metrics. He can then use that report to set up goals for which he can hold the whole team accountable. If that manager wanted to get a bit more granular and manage different divisions in his factory, for example, if the widgets need to be painted, the manager could create a KPI such as “number of widgets painted per hour.” If he implemented this throughout his factory, it would allow the manager to see exactly where inefficiencies and bottlenecks might exist and give him insight into where improvements could be made. He could also create other reports to create efficiency and cut back on waste. He could create a KPI like “yield of widgets per bucket of paint.” The possibilities are endless. The further the manager drills down in creating these KPIs, the more granular his control is over the total outcome, which is simply the sum of all tasks that go into it.

This manager must ensure that he is managing for outcomes and not activities (sometimes referred to as leading indicators). An example of an activity would be “man-hours per day.” While it is true that more man-hours should mean higher output, it’s not necessarily always the case and ignores efficiency. The goal when managing should always be to manage for outcomes; anything short of that is frivolous.

This does not mean that activity should be ignored; it does have its place in properly performing your management duties. In our previous example, we used a very tangible goal that can be completed and measured daily, if not hourly. But what about something more complex, for example, managing a marketing team with creatives charged with creating sales-generating advertisements? Could you manage them effectively with the same methodology?

Before I continue, let me make an analogy that most will relate to. Imagine that you go to the gym for the first time in years. Your goal is to lose 10 lbs. and have a chiseled physique. After a long workout session, you go straight to the mirror. What will you see? Nothing. It would be totally unreasonable to see results at this stage. Imagine now you repeat this experiment the next day and the day after that. Still, the mirror will show you no result. Nor should we expect it to. The nature of what we are doing takes a longer period of time to achieve the desired outcome, so how should we manage this? We know all too well that if left to our own devices, we’ll start cutting corners and having “cheat days,” and we’ll miss our goals entirely. So we set a weekly target and begin tracking the days that we go to the gym and our diet using a calendar. The gym and our diet are our “activities,” but the “outcome” is the goal we created at the onset, losing 10 lbs.

Tracking the activities will keep us accountable and ensure that we are moving along the right track. However, the trap that we must avoid is managing ourselves based on these activities. For example, we have been going to the gym for three months (one fiscal quarter), and we have gained 3 lbs. But we have a perfect record on our activity checklist, not missing even one day! The activity is totally mute since the outcome was not achieved. But what we can ascertain then is that there is some other underlying problem. We know that we have been doing our activities as they were prescribed. So then, we can conclude that our process must be incorrect. We should then step back, rework that process and address its issues before continuing. However, the mistake is made when we try to make ourselves (or bringing it back to the business world – our subordinates) feel better because the activities were done as prescribed. Do not give yourself or anyone in your organization the professional equivalent of a participation trophy simply for showing up to work and doing what you were supposed to do. In short, achieving the goal is the only thing that matters. The activity is just a benchmark used to make sure we are moving. If you hit your activity quotas but still miss your goal, something is wrong. Do not take solace in the fact that activities were met. Take a step back and recalibrate. You are probably measuring the wrong activities.

Going back to our manager who is tasked with overseeing the marketing team and the question we posed there. Could you manage an advertising team the same way you would a factory? It’s easy for many to say “no”—especially anyone who has ever been charged to do so. You may say, “These are a team of creatives; it’s not labor. There’s a lot of thought, effort, etc., that goes into what we do. Output cannot be so easily measured!” I would argue, as should any good chief executive, the output must be measured. As the adage goes: If we cannot measure it, we cannot manage it.

Now here is where managerial creativity comes in. How do we manage our marketing department the same way we would our production factory? Do we measure it by the number of ads produced the same way we measured the number of widgets produced in the factory? Unequivocally, no! The marketing department’s job is to generate leads/sales, which is ultimately the outcome we are managing for. Any other activity within the department should only be looked at to ensure that the pace is maintained to hit the greater goal.

In any organization, any manager in a technical or creative part of the business will argue that they cannot be managed this way. Still, it is the job of the chief executive to ensure that every department in his organization has clear outcomes and goals which are aligned with the company’s greater goals. The prerequisite for leadership is the ability for the leader to establish worthy goals for his organization and then to motivate them by way of management to accomplish those goals. To move the organization and its people closer to self-actualization.

In summary, to be an effective manager, you must identify and select the right objectives for your organization, set up proper KPIs for measuring the outcomes, and finally determine the activities that you should track to ensure that you can hit those goals. Activities can be looked at frequently, but outcomes are usually tracked quarterly or, in some cases, even annually, depending on their nature. Another piece of advice here is that less is usually more. When picking objectives, you must be selective. Remember, if everything is important, then nothing is. Your business is a going concern; its life is indefinite. And like life, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. It is better to pick fewer goals and reach them more quickly than pick too many and find yourself flustered and pulled in too many directions. As Benjamin Franklin so eloquently put it: Make haste slowly.