The difference between management and leadership is...

If I had to come up with my own Mount Rushmore of great leaders, there's a good chance that the British statesman, orator, writer, and world leader Winston Churchill would be on it.  Churchill had his faults, but there's no question that his leadership during World War II saved Great Britain, which likely saved the world. Churchill once said, "The difference between mere management and leadership is communication."

Leadership is all about communication.  As Mike Myatt recently wrote in a Forbes article  ("10 Communication Secrets of Great Leaders"), "It is simply impossible to become a great leader without being a great communicator."  Unfortunately, a recent study appearing in the Academy of Management journal found that leaders do not communicate nearly enough.  As the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw said, "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."

The study investigators analyzed the results of both employee engagement surveys and 360 degree leadership assessments and found that leaders are nearly ten times as likely to be criticized for not communicating enough compared to communicating too much.  Moreover, leaders who don't communicate enough are viewed as less effective and less empathetic.  When leaders don't communicate enough, employees rate them much lower in terms of leadership ability.

Now there is more to communication than just the quantity of communication.  However, what this study shows is that even if leaders communicate well (in terms of the quality of communication), they are probably not communicating enough.  And, even if leaders think that they are communicating enough, they probably aren't meeting the expectations of their employees.