hey everyone welcome to q a so today someone sent in the question what is the difference between managers and directors great question thank you for sending that in this is actually not as intuitive as a lot of people might think let's see if i can break it down for you okay managers in theory a manager is someone who does four things planning organizing influencing and controlling hopefully we know what planning is that's where you figure out what actions you need to do to achieve a goal organizing that's where you do things like budgeting creating teams
assigning responsibilities allocating resources influencing that's a super important area that's where you try and get other people to behave in the way that you would have them behave so that includes things like leadership communication skills negotiation all that kind of stuff and controlling sometimes you see in organizations people that have the title controller usually it's filled by an accountant of some kind controlling that's where you monitor what's going on and if the if the ship is kind of going off course and you're not really going towards that goal you make changes to kind of steer
that ship back towards the goal okay so you correct any uh deviation so in theory that's what a manager does in an organization there's all kinds of managers you can see them uh in job listings there's any type of manager you could ever possibly imagine uh that's what you find in the real world okay that's a manager director here's where the confusion lies because the term director actually has two definitions let's talk about the first one okay now in theory a director is someone who manages managers okay so in theory if you looked at the
organizational chart of an organization you'd have the workers here at the bottom you'd have managers here kind of in the middle and you'd have directors here at the top okay in theory that's that's how it's supposed to work now in reality uh usually above the workers you get supervisors and then managers who are called frontline managers okay and then overseeing them you get second line managers or what's more commonly referred to as mid-level managers that's the term i tend to use because that's what i see most often in in the wild okay mid-level managers now
if you're in a very very large organization what they do is they actually formalize the title director and usually that indicates the lowest level of executive okay so if you have workers down here and you got managers in the middle and you have your executives at the top if it's a large organization at the executive level they'll have multiple levels of executive and the lowest level will be called the director the director level often above that you get the vice president level and often above that you get the c level which is things like chief
marketing officer chief operating officer chief financial officer okay so officially that's what sometimes we see directors level is the lowest level of executive now that's the first definition of the word director there is a second definition of that word also okay and that refers to somebody who's on the board of directors okay now instead of calling them person who sits on the board of directors they call them directors for short and this is where the confusion arises the directors or the board of directors they don't manage the company so they're not involved in running the
company instead these are the owners of the company now in a large organization if you're a director if you're on the board of directors you represent shareholders and if you're in a smaller organization you are the shareholders okay the directors are the shareholders so that's the difference between those two terms managers and directors it depends what context you're talking about and the annoying thing is that a lot of organizations haven't really standardized how they name their management level so it's going to vary from industry to industry and from organization to organization but that's basically the
rundown of what those two terms mean now i just want to say thank you to the person who sent this in i'm very sorry i lost the name of the person who actually sent this in so if this is you okay you win the prize which is a virtual handshake for me and who wouldn't want that it's gonna look something like this i guess if i can do that right that's maybe too close something like that okay so now that you have that you'll be like the coolest guy in your neighborhood for like a week
when you tell people that that's what you got okay so thank you very much thank you for watching this video you guys are awesome and i will see you on the next one take care
