Leadership & Management – we need both

I have written this article because I am fed up with reading that management is all about “persuading people to do things they don’t want to do”.

There are lists everywhere which purport management to be about telling, ordering, pushing and being downright unpleasant and leadership to be about inspiring, coaching, helping and being intrinsically noble!!

Firstly, we need to detach leadership & management from leaders and managers. Leaders and managers are people; leadership & management are what people incarnate – it’s not exactly the same thing. Someone who is being pushy, micromanaging, deciding autocratically, criticising people is engaging neither in leadership nor management.

A leader, in the business world, is someone who is expected (there is an emphasis on “expected”) to “show the way”, to be “forward looking”, to “have a vision”, to “create momentum”; on the other hand, a manager is someone who is expected (same comment with regards to the emphasis) to “structure work”, to “prioritise objectives” to “plan activities”, to “monitor progress”.

Without being too simplistic; leaders create the desire to go somewhere and managers put into place what’s needed to get there.

The majority of people in business have some kind of manager related title; “group manager”, “senior manager”, “department manager”, “production manager”, “branch manager”, others are disguised with titles such “head of” or even “vice-president of”. However, they are all need to use a mix of management & leadership; they need to inspire, encourage & motivate their teams to work towards the organisations objectives and they need to ensure that the resources and systems are in place to allow the now enthusiastic team to actually do the job.

In my day-to-day work I interact with managers at all levels of organisations; there are those, at all levels, that are great at management and there are those that are great at leadership, and then there are those that are great at both management & leadership – I’ll leave you to imagine, in general, those that make a real difference with their teams.

Leadership is not better or preferable to management, we need both; leadership without management can lead to broken promises and management without leadership can lead to turning in circles.

Leaders are not better than managers; both are people and at the end of the day, a title is what you make of it. You may be the manager of an operational team working on highly technical work package in your area of technical expertise or you may be a manager of a transversal team working on strategic orientations for which you are far from the expert – in both cases you will need some structure and organisation in order for your motivated, enthusiastic and willing people to get a result.

 Here’s what the Wall Street Journal says about Leadership and Management:

• Leadership and management must go hand in hand. They are not the same thing. But they are necessarily linked, and complementary.
• Workers need their managers not just to assign tasks but to define purpose

Leadership & Management

We need both

If you have enjoyed reading this, you may like to take a look at some other articles I have posted on LinkedIn:

LinkedIn posts

If you would like to discuss leadership development you can contact me through LinkedIn