Speaker 1: 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 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 deviation. So in theory, that's what a manager does. In an organization, there's all kinds of managers. You can see them in job listings. There's any type of manager you could ever possibly imagine. 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 how it's supposed to work. Now in reality, 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 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. Director's 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 is 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 from me and who wouldn't want that? It's going to look something like this, I guess, if I can do that right. That's maybe a bit 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.