The Difference Between Managers and Leaders
It is often difficult to understand the difference between
managers and leaders. Do managers lead? Do leaders manage? To
understand how these two concepts are distinct yet different,
here are 7 ways to understand them.
1. Course and Steering. The word "leadership" comes from
the Old English word "lad" for a "course". A "lode" is a vein
that leads or guides to ore; a lodestone is a magnetic stone
that guides; the lode-star is the name for the star that guides
sailors, the Pole star. The word "management" comes from the
Latin word "manus", the hand, from which we also get
"maintenance" and "mainstay". Leadership guides by setting a
ship's course. Management keeps a hand on the tiller.
2. Growth and Survival. Organisations are no different
from any other living organism: they need both to survive and
grow. Survival is necessary in order to meet the basic
requirements of life: in individuals, food, water and shelter;
in organisations, a profit, customers, premises, and work.
Growth is also necessary so that, like the individual person, an
organisation can make the most of what it is capable of. The
maintenance of the organisation is essentially a management
function: measuring, looking back, assessing, taking stock,
taking careful decisions. Taking the organisation into areas of
growth, change and development, to make the most of it, is what
leadership is all about.
3. Resources and Potential. Management measures what it
can count and see. A person in the enterprise is described by
their name and title, measured by their output, listed in the
database according to their skills and added in the accounts
under the heading "manpower resources". Management deals with
the past and how people performed to date. Leadership,on the
other hand, sees people as capable of things you cannot measure
and doing things they never thought possible. It deals with the
future and how people could perform if their potential were
realised.
4. Left and Right Brains. The left hemisphere of the
brain is the seat of our logical and rational thinking. The
right brain is the seat of our imaginative, creative and
emotional thinking. While these two sides are distinct, they
also work best when whole. The left brain is an analogy for
management. It deals with what can be counted; detail; control;
domination; worldly interests; action; analysis; measurement;
and order. The right brain is an analogy for leadership. It
deals with what cannot be counted; seeing things as a whole;
synthesis; possibilities; belief; vision; artistry; intuition;
and imagination.
5. The Seven S's. Richard Pascale says that the processes
that take place in organisations fall under seven "S" headings:
strategy, structure, systems, shared values, staff, skills and
style. The functions of strategy, structure, and systems are the
hard S's and the proper concern of managers because they deal
with things or technology. The functions of staff, skills,
style, and shared values are the soft S's and the proper concern
of leaders because they deal with people.
6. Art and Science. John Adair in his book "Leadership"
compares management and leadership to the old dichotomy of Art
and Science. Managers are of the mind, accurate, calculated,
routine, statistical, methodical. Management is a science.
Leaders are of the spirit, compounded of personality and vision.
Leadership is an art. Managers are necessary; leaders are
essential.
7. Short-Term and Long. When an organisation thinks about
now and the near-future, it thinks of itself as a production
unit. It sees the problems it might face as technical problems
needing technical answers. When an organisation thinks about the
distant future, it thinks about building, learning and growing.
It seeks to identify and develop its opportunities. It defines
itself by what it is, not by what it does. The difference
between short-term and long-term thinking is the difference
between an organisation that holds on tight to what it has and
an organisation that stays loose and lets things grow.
Organisations that need quick fixes rely on managers.
Organisations that want to grow rely on leaders.
The difference between management and leadership is like the
difference between male and female, sun and moon, night and day,
fat and thin, hot and cold, coming and going, and so on. They
are two sides to the same coin. In being the one, we see the
other. While different and distinct, they are parts of the
whole: essential contrasts, that in contrasting, make clearer
the other.