Managers and leaders

“Leadership is different from management, but not for the reason most people think. Leadership isn't mystical and mysterious. It has nothing to do with having charisma or other exotic personality traits. It's not the province of a chosen few. Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it: rather, leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary activities. Both are necessary for success in an increasingly complex and volatile business environment.” (Kotter, 1990, p103)

According to Kotter (1990), all managers are leaders, but not all leaders are managers.

Leaders	Managers
Defined as ‘doing the right things’	Defined as just ‘the rules followings’
Establishing direction: Vision of the future, develop strategies for change to achieve goals.	Plans and budgets: Decide action plans and timetables, allocate resources.
Leaders often set their own goals and create new culture within the organization.	Managers try to achieve the goals just within the existing culture and directions.
Aligning people: Communicate vision and strategy, influence creation of teams which accept validity of goals.	Organizing and staffing: Decide structure and allocate staff, develop policies, procedures and monitoring.
Leaders do things effectively.	Managers do things efficiently.
Motivating and inspiring: Energize people to overcome obstacles, satisfy human needs.	Controlling, problem solving: Monitor results against plan and take corrective action.
Produces positive and sometimes dramatic change.	Produces order, consistency and predictability.

“Most of us have become so enamored of ‘leadership’ that ‘management’ has been pushed into the background. Nobody aspires to being a good manager anymore; everybody wants to be a great leader. But the separation of management from leadership is dangerous. Just as management without leadership encourages an uninspired style, which deadens activities, leadership without management encourages a disconnected style, which promotes hubris. And we all know the destructive power of hubris in organisations.” (Gosling and Mintzberg, 2003).

Consequently, a manager is always regarded as a leader, but in fact being a good leader is much harder than being a good manager. With the distinction between management and leadership may have been useful in terms of attention to the strategic and motivational qualities required during periods of change, the bipolar representation of managers and leaders as completely different people can be misleading and potentially harmful in practice. Actually if it is believed that leaders and managers are different people:

(a) it is necessary to change the management team regularly as circumstances change

(b) it is not possible for managers to become leaders (and vice versa).

And this view is strictly limiting and greatly underestimates the abilities of people in management and leadership roles. (Bolden, 2004)