MANAGEMENT VERSUS EDUCATION
As a leader it is important to understand the difference between management and education. Yes, management and education have a lot of similar attributes. On the surface, the two can look extremely similar, there is a great difference with respect to the goals.
Both in management and education, decisions must be made with consideration towards people’s viewpoints. Things that these people say or do should be considered with every decision a manager or educator is tasked with making.
Indeed, if you were to pull a military (management), teaching (education), parenting (education) or business (management) book from your local Barnes and Noble or Amazon, you will find a lot of similar principles used in both environments. And, for good reason, core principles such as praising along with correction, inspecting what is expected and other key phrases (many of which are different ways of saying the same thing) are universal and extremely helpful for a military leader, small business owner, a parent, or a lowly (lowly) Martial Arts Instructor.
The part where management and education may differ, even if the environment is the same, is on the goals of that moment. A manager strives to make any event (day project or anything of a sort) work as efficiently as possible, with people under her or his care ideally working to where they are the strongest. On the other hand, an educator strives to make sure that the people involved are in a position where they can be educated at the highest level.
For instance, a Lieutenant Colonel in charge of a Battalion does not want the third-best cook in charge of all the meal prep, simply because that person really needs to make sure that all the people in the unit are fighting fit and ready and ready to go. Even more so, if the cook assigned, even inadvertently, poisoned some of the soldiers, the Lt Colonel would have to seriously consider removing the person from the position. The goal is to make sure the Battalion is ready, not that the cook learned a lesson.
On the other hand, a Master Chef at Le Cordon Bleu will go out of his or her way to make sure the students are given challenging assignments. When the students mess up, it is a good learning experience for them and tells the Master Chef what the students need to work on next. The goal is to expand the mind and skills of the individual.
A manager puts the best people in the best position for the job at hand. An educator continually rotates people from position to position for the sake of making the individuals better and more intelligent.
Without proper management, education can become disorganized and ineffective. Similarly, management without education may achieve short-term success but could face challenges in the long term. As with many things, a balance must be attained in any environment whether you are an educator, a leader, an owner of a small company or a parent of a family, all these involve a balance between education and management.
It is essential to understand the current goals in any environment, and – more importantly – make sure we are not mixing the two in a way that is confusing to the people we are working with.
For instance, the military has phrases such as “speak freely” and other rituals that are used to elicit conversation and education to achieve a better resulting unit cohesiveness. Likewise, an educator, who normally would encourage having thoughtful conversation and interaction for the sake of expanding the student’s thought process, will often give an assignment without any room for debate. Such as a teacher asking a young student to write the same phrase repeatedly, to train the hand in writing.
On the other hand, it is important that managers and educators do not confuse their role. Common phrase of “it’s good for him” is often used in a manager’s catch phrase when they send a person to do a task that they are not ready for. Likewise, an educator complaining that the students are questioning a line of logic, when the environment is specifically designed for debate has been known to happen too.
It is important to make sure that both managers and educators – many times the same person - are clear with what the goals are when an assignment is given to a person. The correct combination of management and education will keep any organization steady with its goals and offer plenty of room to grow!