The Working Week 22: Vince Thompson on the difference between leadership and management

This week, Wayne is joined by his old friend Vince Thompson, author of Ignited, to discuss the very real difference between leadership and management - and why the current fad for leadership training is selling managers short.

Vince has plied his trade as a manger in restaurants, then in television stations then for seven years as Regional Vice President of Sales for America Online. Now with his firm Middleshift, he helps Internet companies scale revenue by building advertising sales businesses and better integrating and empowering those in the middle.

But because his early days in management were marked with frustration, Vince came to learn that the answers were out there - but not in a form easily accessible to managers.

His book, Ignited, is a guide for managers on how to make their jobs less stressful, more efficient and ultimately more successful and rewarding – all ambitions close to Wayne's heart.

Compounding the frustration many managers feel is the fact that the training and development they are offered is often either inadequate or just wrongly-focussed – spending too much time on the holy grail of "leadership" and not enough on the mechanics of what it means to be a manager on a daily basis.

All of which leads to that vital question – what is the difference between leadership and management?.

Yet as Vince points out, all the leadership training in the world can't make up for a lack of real management skills – something that training managers and providers often seem to forget. So much so, in fact, that this obsession with leadership is slanting training priorities for the worst.

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