An Alternate View of Management vs. Leadership

The Small Business CEO Blog linked to an article called, Leading vs. Managing -- They're Two Different Animals.

The article has some good points, but I also want to bring up a topic that is near and dear to my heart. Perhaps I am just a trouble maker, but I don’t agree with a few of the points this article is making.

The author paints a picture of managers and leaders as being fundamentally different people with different views. Here is a portion of the article:

“First of all, let's take a look at the difference in personality styles between a manager and a leader.

Managers - emphasize rationality and control; are problem-solvers (focusing on goals, resources, organization structures, or people); often ask question, "What problems have to be solved, and what are the best ways to achieve results so that people will continue to contribute to this organization?"; are persistent, tough-minded, hard working, intelligent, analytical, tolerant and have goodwill toward others.

Leaders - are perceived as brilliant, but sometimes lonely; achieve control of themselves before they try to control others; can visualize a purpose and generate value in work; are imaginative, passionate, non-conforming risk-takers.

Managers and leaders have very different attitudes toward goals.

Managers - adopt impersonal, almost passive, attitudes toward goals; decide upon goals based on necessity instead of desire and are therefore deeply tied to their organization's culture; tend to be reactive since they focus on current information.

Leaders - tend to be active since they envision and promote their ideas instead of reacting to current situations; shape ideas instead of responding to them; have a personal orientation toward goals; provide a vision that alters the way people think about what is desirable, possible, and necessary.“

Here’s what does not ring true for me:

1. I don’t see managers and leaders as different people. We can all demonstrate management and leadership. We are leaders some of the time and we need to be managers some of the time. To do our jobs well and to be successful we must be great managers AND leaders. We might have natural tendencies toward management or leading, but we can learn and develop both capabilities. I know some people think leadership cannot be taught, but I have seen people learn leadership and I have helped professionals develop both management and leadership skills.

2. I think there is good management and poor management. Good leadership and poor leadership. This article seems to be saying that management is old school and leadership is hip and now. Management can be hip and leadership can be old school.

For example, they say “managers adopt impersonal, almost passive, attitudes toward goals.” They also say managers tend to be more reactive than proactive. Poor managers do this, but great managers take great care and interest in goals and are very proactive. Showing interest and being proactive does not make one a leader.

What’s the difference between leadership and management?

To me, management refers to the responsibilities we have that are about taking care of business processes, planning, assignments, quality, productivity, and the alignment of the organization. Management is the practice of tending to regular and emerging business needs. Management is the craft of tending to the details of the business in an engaged, proactive and results oriented manner.

Leadership refers to the responsibilities we have that are about influencing, inspiring, and enlivening our employees, peers, and customers. We demonstrate leadership when we communicate in a compelling manner, encourage productive dialogue, and when we role model excellence.

There is a shortage of great management in many of today’s corporations. Perhaps the management vs. leadership mindset is one reason for this. Leadership is certainly the “sexier” of the two and I wonder if some have abandoned developing excellent management skills because they want to be a leader.

The best and most successful business people will practice effective and contemporary management and will provide the leadership that their organizations need.

Oh, and one more thing: Neither great leaders nor great managers try to control other people.

This article does not go into this, but I have heard others say that whether someone is a manager or leader is a function of how high they are up the corporate food-chain. While the needs of each position are different and the mix of management and leadership might differ, I reject the notion that as you move up you no longer need the ability to manage well.

The article has its strong points too, and does acknowledge some of the important skills that managers need. My concern is the overarching message which seems incomplete and not quite right.

I love finding articles like these, though, as they provide an opportunity for open dialogue and debate.

What’s your perspective?

Comments

[Terry Storch]

Outstanding post, and a great perspective. I tend to agree with most of your points. I think that in todays culture "leadership" is the cool and innovative way to guide people. Everyone is wired differently, and they will lead differently, people need to embrace how they are wired and focus on being as effective as they can be.

[Nerio Vakil]

I can't remember where I read it, but the best differentiation I came across was that "Management is a career whereas Leadership is a calling."

[Steve Rucinski]

Great points, I personally call Leadership and Management my career choice and they are intertwined and unseperable, I am not one or the other but both.

[Lisa Haneberg]

Terry - I totally agree, it's about being effective in your own way.
Nerio - Great quote. I think for some, management can also be a calling, but you are right, most associate that with leadership.
Steve - Right on - management and leadership are intertwined.

It's all about recognizing what's needed and taking the initiative to do that. Great comments, thanks.

[Tim Stanley]

This was a great article. You are correct, leadership has become the new and exciting trend in organizations. This is espectally true at college. I recently earned a Masters in Organizational Leadership and a second Masters in Organzational Management from two different universities. In both programs, the leadership verses management debate was intense. The professors with extensive work experience in the private sector were in favor of the idea that leadership was part of the management function. On the other hand, the professors with careers in education and the public sector wanted to argue that leaders and managers are different. And, there was a real lack of respect for the management discipline. We need more discussion about this subject, because many organzations are in need of good managers with good leadership skills. Thanks

[Lisa Haneberg]

Tim: A hadn't thought about it from the perspective of what's being reinforced in Masters programs, so thanks for that observation. Like you, I think it would serve students and companies well if the merits and value of great management were taught in equal proportions to the need and positive aspects of leadership.

Perhaps that this is why I tend to talk more about management than leadership - to help the balance. Both are important to me, of course.

[Brad Appleton]

Hi Lisa! Great blog!

Not sure how/if this fits in with your blog-entry, but one thing Ive often heard used to describe the difference between leaders and managers is "managers are concerned with visible motion, leaders are concerned with palpable progress."

Maybe that's not a manager -vs- leader distinction, but perhaps merely a difference between a "false" manager/leader and a true manager/leader?

[Lisa Haneberg]

Brad - Very interesting....palpable progress...I'm gonna have to think on that one. Thanks for sharing!

[Rich]

WOW ! !
What have we become? a society of managers?

You make several generalizations and maybe that's the nature of the beast, but let's not dismiss them. First leaders are not "non-conforming risk-takers" as you propose - contrarily Leaders are risk-assessors and take the path best suited for the organization, its future, and its long-term goals.

While you may not see managers and leaders as different, in fact, they are. Bernard Bass (1990) said defined transformational leadership as Bass (1990) defines transformational leadership as “The transformational leader asks followers to transcend their own self interests for the good of the group, organization or society; to consider their long-term needs to develop themselves, rather than their needs of the moment; and to become aware of what is really important”. Additionally, Bass (1990) applied the concepts of charisma and intellectual stimulation to motivate employees for the greater good.

Look at that quote again "transcend their own self interests for the good of the group, organization or society; to consider their long-term needs to develop themselves, rather than their needs of the moment"

You also miss the distinction of leadership, is a leader transformational or transactional? (googlescholar.com could help with definitions for those interested)

Managers certainly are the "do"ers of organizational life - but they do for the now... while important, someone must do for the long-term, create a vision, communicate it, obtain buy-in, but up and down the organizational ladder (after all leaders exist in all areas of an organization not just the highest levels)

Really there's too much to say in a short post like this, but if you really think that managers and leaders are not all that different, please drop me an e-mail and I'd be glad to present you some alternative ideas.

[Lisa Haneberg]

Great leaders and managers make a huge difference to the organization. I think the traditional notionds of management and leadership need to be retired. I did not say that managers and leaders were not different - I said they should not be different.

[Richard]

So I guess the question is, what do you consider to be "the traditional notions of management and leadership?" You describe personality and attitude, are these your definitions? Because I think you can see how narrow they are.

Certainly managers can have leadership qualities (btw what do you consider these to be?) and leaders can (maybe even should) have management skills...But the fact is they are different. We would like managers to be leaders and vice-versa, however, managers focus on the goal at hand, and leaders focus on the over-arching organizational mission.

Certainly one cannot survive without the other - with this I think we can both agree, but to expect your managers to lead depends greatly on your definition of leadership.

You also state that you think leadership can be taught -- this is a hotly debated topic -- if it truly could be taught, wouldn't we have more Jack Welsh's and Sandy Weil's? I would have to say yes, yet we are sorely lacking in these types of individuals, why is that?

Lisa - I mean no disrespect, but this much too big a topic to cover in a blog, there are too many vains in this spider to cover in a short article or several blog postings.

[Lisa Haneberg]

Richard - I don't take your comments as disrespect. And I agree, leadership is too broad a topic to handle in one post, one blog, or one library of books. That is certainly not my intent. I want to engage in the topic. Sometimes that means looking broad, sometimes very narrow.

I am not looking at this the same way you are, which is just fine and dandy. I don't see managers and leaders as different people in the new economy. There are leadership practices and management practices which are different.

I have known CEOs who failed due to poor management practices. I have known front line supervisors who failed due to a lack of leadership. The point I was making is that I find it egotistical (not you) and unhelpful to characterize people as either managers or leaders based on their titles. I know many people who consider the first X layers managers and the top X layers leaders. And that dog don't hunt with the reality in top performing companies.

The reason we are not developing better leaders is that the quality of leadership and management education in most companies stinks. I do believe that leadership can be taught but that universities and corporations are largely failing.

Your thoughts are interesting and I thank you for them!

[Cara Fletcher]

You're right saying in point 1 that we are both leaders and managers.One good manager should have leadership skills too if he wants to be successful.Those two things are joined together.

[Bruce Watson]

The concept of "leadership" is pervading job advertisements, position descriptions, professional development programs and no doubt, job applicant résumés with great force. A distinction is often made between "leaders" and "managers". A disturbing trend in some of the current writing on leadership is that being a leader is "good" whereas as being a manager is "bad". Is this warranted and what about the "followers"?

Words conjure up pictures - they are powerful in what they can convey. We all form our own picture in our brains when we hear a word like "elephant" which is based on our previous experience of an elephant. We might simultaneously "see" the string of ordered letters that form the word (e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t) and a familiar depiction of an elephant. The specific collection of letters themselves are a symbolic representation of an elephant.The tendency of the brain is to attach meaning to the symbolic representation and "see" pictures of an elephant based on our experience. Similarly, words such as "manager" or "leader" conjure up pictures based on our familiarity or experience of both concepts, positive or negative. Our individual views can be remarkably different based on our individual assumptions, conceptions and experiences.

"Management" has become so aligned with explicit, functional, mechanistic, “cold” processes such as planning, organising and controlling (some would say this is "bad") while "leadership" is consistently associated with vision, inspiration, persuasion, influence and motivation (some would say this is preferable and therefore "good"). However, the argument becomes more complex when the skills so freely attributed to managers and leaders can be found in infamous dictatorships. There are dictators who could fit most of the criteria for good management and leadership but they destroyed people's lives. So it needs to be recognised there are good and bad leaders just as there are good and bad managers if we stick to such terminology.

Boring bureaucrats & inspirational figures

The dichotomy so firmly established between "management" and "leadership" is not really helpful because generally speaking managers need to be good leaders and leaders need to be good managers. For example, is it possible to lead without planning or being organised? Is it possible to manage without a vision? Taken to the extremes of the depictions mentioned earlier, managers become boring bureaucrats stuck in the status quo and leaders become inspirational figures with their heads in the clouds. “Leadership” is better thought of as an attributed status rather than a formal position. A helpful distinction is between authority which formally goes with a position and power which is attributed to the position by “followers”. Leadership, then, is something that can move throughout a network of individuals depending on the context and circumstances. For example, extraordinary leadership can be displayed in a meeting of staff by each individual present not only the chairperson or senior staff. Consequently, managers are probably better off trying to work out the complexities of what is going on in the individual minds and throughout the networks of the employees rather than placing such concentration on their own activities as leaders. However, it is clear that directive command in particular situational contexts is very important – ‘good’ managers have to be capable of making timely, informed decisions and be accountable for them in the end.

Leadership unpacked

The concept of management has its own difficulties. For the moment, however, the problems of the concept of leadership are well demonstrated in “A Passion for Excellence” (Peters and Austin, 1985). First the authors' position is: leadership is the key to excellence; but then, leadership and trust are required; but then, leadership, trust and integrity are required; but then, leadership; trust, integrity and listening are required; but then, leadership, trust, integrity, listening, coaching, empowerment are required. The authors claimed to take a common-sense, anti-theoretical approach. This is interesting in itself because anything we claim to ‘know’ is theoretical. Our individual knowledge is based on our observations and senses and how the brain interprets them, consequently some individual theories are going to be better than others. The most common problem in descriptive accounts of leadership like that described in "A Passion for Excellence" is the lack of hard evidence. The final list of assumptions for good leadership starts to sound like what would be expected of a ‘good manager’ in any case so why make a distinction between "managers" and "leaders"?

The evidence for "leadership - is there any?

A basic understanding of “good leadership” tends to say things like: democratic is better than authoritarian, employee-centred is better than production-centred, human relations is better than bureaucratic rules and that good leadership leads to better morale, consequently better/higher production. Really? Where did such notions originate from?

The effects of leadership behaviour were originally categorised by the findings of interdisciplinary designed questionnaire research, e.g. Leader Behaviour Description Questionnaire (LBDQ), used widely in the 1970’s. Through analyses of questionnaire responses the process was, in general terms, to categorise leaders into ‘warm and friendly’ (considerate – people oriented) or ‘operational, organises’ (initiating structure – task oriented).

Using skills and attributes that a researcher has concluded are important for leadership (e.g. democratic, employee-centred) observable behaviours for the skills and attributes are determined (e.g. is friendly, raises morale, sets goals) and data is collected using a questionnaire based on the researcher’s construct. The numerous questionnaire responses are analysed usually through statistical methods or some sort of factor analysis. Then the outcomes are used as evidence to support the researcher's perception of leadership. In summary, a generic leadership construct is defined rather than actually known, somewhat like that described by Peters and Austin above. The concept becomes self perpetuating based on assumptions made right at the start.

On analysis the "leadership" concept described in much of the literature is highly misleading and questionable. A questionnaire respondent, for example, might be asked “A good leader is democratic – Agree / Disagree”. Despite what the respondent might actually believe, prior knowledge that democratic is considered ‘good’ and authoritarian is ‘bad’ will influence the way in which such a question is answered. Also note that the observable behaviours mentioned above are only based on the perceptions and interpretations of questionnaire respondents. For example, what one respondent finds "friendly" or "morale boosting" another may not.

Remarkably, a subsequent conclusion was reached that basically either type of leader, 'warm and friendly' or 'operational-organises', got the job done. The problem, of course, was that contextual and situational effects had not been taken into account. It is difficult to be 'warm and friendly' if the building is on fire and it is your job to get the staff out post haste. It is also difficult to be 'warm and friendly' in a military situation if you are the Captain and your troops are being bombed. There are times where an authoritarian approach is possibly critical. Recognising the extreme limitations of the previous work, some researchers tried to include situational and context factors in adaptations of 'leadership behaviour questionnaires', however, the interpretative and perceptual actions of respondents described above still remained.

An unhelpful dichotomy

The tendency for numerous descriptions of, and prescriptions for, leadership that do not take into account what leadership might actually ‘be’ is a recipe for disaster. Studies into implicit learning and tacit knowledge suggest that there are unobservable elements to "leadership" so there is a necessity to put aside the simplistic viewpoints so widely available and try harder to make sense of the complexities.

Yes, the difficulties with the concept of management can still be argued, but using “leadership” as a separate concept is generally proving unhelpful. It may well be concluded that good management includes "leadership" as a necessary attribute and skill, when there is a firmer grip on what leadership actually is. A further conclusion is that “leadership” may boil down to influencing in an appropriate way taking into account the context and situation elements of the circumstances. And surely influence is something that is distributed throughout organisations, just as learning and knowledge are. This suggests that the individual manager as the total "unit of analysis" is not really going to assist organisational performance or management practice in the long run. What about the employees, followers and antagonists?