There is a LinkedIn post you have seen a hundred times. Two columns. Left side: "Managers tell people what to do." Right side: "Leaders inspire vision." The post gets thousands of likes. The comments are full of people nodding along. And every one of those nods is doing damage to a software team somewhere.
I spent twenty minutes on a recent podcast with Ben Morton arguing about this, and the more we talked the more I realised the "leader vs manager" framing is not a useful distinction. It is a dysfunction. It teaches people to avoid half the job and feel noble while doing it.
The meme which broke a generation of engineering leaders
The dichotomy is older than LinkedIn. It traces back to a 1977 Harvard Business Review essay by Abraham Zaleznik called "Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?" Zaleznik wanted to make a sharp academic point. The internet, predictably, took the sharp point and ran with it until management became a slur.
You see the result in every engineering org I have worked in. The new tech lead reads three blog posts about servant leadership, internalises the message: "leaders set vision, managers push tickets," and promptly stops doing the boring half of the job. One-to-ones drift. Sprint planning gets delegated to whoever has the strongest opinion in the room. Performance issues fester for six months because addressing them feels too "managerial." The team starts to wobble. The lead, baffled, doubles down on vision-setting.
The team does not need more vision. The team needs someone who will read the JIRA board on a Tuesday morning and notice the same blocker has been parked for three sprints.
Why software teams pay the highest price
Most professions have a buffer between bad management and bad outcomes. Software does not. The work is invisible. The output is measured in months. The cost of a stuck engineer compounds quietly until a launch slips by a quarter.
Gallup's research on this is brutal. Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. This is not a leadership stat. It is a management stat. It is the daily, unglamorous act of noticing your people, removing their blockers, and telling them where they stand. Swap it out for an inspirational off-site every quarter and your team feels the loss within weeks.
The engineering teams I have seen fall apart did not lack vision. They had vision coming out of their ears. What they lacked was someone willing to say, on a Thursday afternoon, "this design review has gone in circles for two hours, here is the decision, I will own it if it is wrong."
Charity Majors had it right
Charity Majors wrote a piece in 2017 which should be required reading for anyone with "lead" in their title. Her argument: engineering and management are different professions, and the best senior people swing between them like a pendulum. She put it bluntly: "Fuck the whole idea that only managers get career progression. And fuckkkk the idea you have to choose a 'lane' and grow old there."
What I love about her framing: it kills the moral hierarchy. Managing is not below engineering. Engineering is not below managing. They are different. You will be bad at one of them when you start, and you will need years to get good. The pendulum is not a fallback. It is the career.
The same logic applies inside a single role. If you are running an engineering team this quarter, you are doing both jobs. You are setting the architectural direction AND you are running the calendar. You are coaching a struggling senior AND you are forecasting next quarter's headcount. The split is not "I do the leader bits, someone else does the manager bits." The split is "today I am running the pendulum, and I need both arcs."
What the dysfunction looks like in practice
I ran a workshop a few years back with a group of new engineering managers. I asked them what they had stopped doing since the promotion. The list was almost identical from person to person.
- Stopped doing code review because "that's not my job anymore."
- Stopped writing weekly updates because "the team should own that."
- Stopped having structured one-to-ones because "we talk every day in standup."
- Stopped writing performance feedback in real time because "I want to focus on growth, not evaluation."
- Stopped attending the architecture forum because "I'm not technical anymore."
Every single item on the list was an act of leadership avoidance dressed up as leadership philosophy. The new managers had absorbed the meme. They had decided the boring work was beneath them. And their teams were paying for it.
When I asked them what they had started doing instead, the answers were vaguer. "Strategic thinking." "Vision-setting." "Coaching." All real things. All important. None of them substitutes for the work they had abandoned.
The 99.5% problem
My own research, run across hundreds of people during my Step It Up HR work, found 99.5% of respondents have worked for one or more types of bad boss. Not a misprint. Almost everyone. And when we dug into what made those bosses bad, the pattern was rarely "they had no vision." It was nearly always "they would not do the work."
They would not have the hard conversation. They would not give clear feedback. They would not make the unpopular trade-off. They would not protect the team from upstream chaos. They would not say "no" to the stakeholder demanding a sixth priority. They would not write down what good looks like, then hold people to it.
Those are management failures, and they make you a bad leader. Because there is no leadership without management. Vision without follow-through is therapy.
How to spot which half you are avoiding
Pick one. Be honest.
If you avoid the management half: Your calendar is full of strategy meetings and skip-levels, your one-to-ones get rescheduled twice a month, you have not given written feedback to anyone in three weeks, and you do not know which of your engineers is currently struggling with which problem. You feel busy and important. Your team feels unseen.
If you avoid the leadership half: You know every blocker, every PR, every Jira ticket. You have not had a strategy conversation with your skip-level boss in two months. You have not asked any of your engineers what they want their career to look like in two years. You feel productive and competent. Your team feels parented but not led.
Both are dysfunction. Both come from the same root cause: you picked a side because it felt more comfortable than doing the whole job.
The work is the work
When I read the rest of the literature on this, the smartest people in the room all land in the same place. Leadership and management are not opposites. They are complementary. One without the other is a vulnerability. Vision without execution is a memo. Execution without vision is busywork.
So next time you see one of those LinkedIn two-column posts, scroll past. Better still, write your own. Title it "Things My Best Boss Did." I guarantee you the list will mix both columns until you cannot tell which is which.
If you lead software people, the question is not whether you are a leader or a manager. The question is whether you are doing the whole job. Today. This week. With the team in front of you.
What did you stop doing when you got promoted? And whose job did you assume someone else would pick up?