Leaders' vs Managers: Different but share many qualities to build a successful organization

The secret to a successful organization: Switching gears between a boss, manager and an influential leader. 

You must have worked under a manager or two in your professional career that you were not very much fond of. On the contrary side, you have probably collaborated with or someone who you admired a lot. A leader is one who paints the picture envisioning what is possible and inspiring and engaging people to turn into a reality whereas a manager or boss has a clear focus on setting, measuring and achieving goals and objectives.

We have seen quite a few contents which talks about comparing “Leaders vs Managers” or “Leaders vs Boss”. In most cases, ‘Leadership’ is glorified as it always stands more attractive. Leaders along cannot get the job done if so, then why all managers’ roles are still exiting even in most innovative organizations.

Back in 2002, I was a site manager responsible for digging trench for for a telecoms company to lay fibre optic cables. My target was to get at least 500m with very few limited equipment and 10 workers. I used my leadership skills to inspire them to perform task. Guess what it didn’t work, only way I could get to work done by using managerial skills such as enforcing and measuring actual working hours where they get paid. At this point of time, it made me really wonder if leadership approach works in all type of work tasks and if so, how pyramids were built in Egypt by leadership alone.

Let us have a look at the attributes that makes a similarity/difference in characteristics of leaders and managers:

Vision and mission. Vision is elementary for leaders to view with a larger scope, bring innovation and motivate team to catch that vision, helping the organization to reach new heights. Managers’ focus on mission, administer and set specific goals, planning and organizing structure for team to understand and implement strategies for what they need to achieve.

Trust, control and self-awareness. Leaders and managers alike should have trust, control and self-awareness in their staff. Managers or leaders mostly have open communication with their employees. A sense of trust must be there inside employees on their managers and leaders, that will make them more confident in executing their work activities.

Accepting ideas as a two-way learning. Employees are inspired to speak up and give their own ideas to execute a task and accomplish business goals. Managers and leaders who are always keen to listen to their employees embrace two-way learning, gaining new creative ideas and deploying it to attain organizational growth.

Here are some practical scenarios where an individual needs to switch gears on their role type based on the task in hand.

While leaders and managers seem to be different, there are many qualities that make them similar as you play to the strengths of both to become a manager who can lead employees strongly and successfully. In my view, with years of experience in multiple roles, one needs to keep switching gears among these - Leader, Manager and Boss based on the type of task he/she is handling to have higher successful outcome for an organization.