Leadership & Management

Leadership & Management

Leadership and management are two distinctly different roles with a somewhat paradoxical relationship.

Abraham Zaleznic, in a now-famous 1977 Harvard Business Review article, was one of the first scholars to differentiate between managers and leaders. According to Zalzenic, managers are focused on getting the job done, whatever that job may be. While managers are concerned with how work is done, leaders are concerned with what is done.  This view is echoed by Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, who state that managers do things right, and leaders are people who do the right thing. Yet Zaleznic goes further, implying that managers are overly rational, somewhat detached and task-oriented—a living personification of Frederick Talyor’s Principles of Scientific Management. By contrast, Zaleznic views leaders as intuitive, empathetic and people focused—a precursor to the emotionally intelligent and transformational forms of leadership that became popular in the late twentieth century. It is important to note that Zaleznic distinguished leaders from managers, not leadership from management.  In Zaleznic’s view, managers and leaders were very different types of people, each with their own distinctive values and personalities.

In 1990, John Kotter, another Harvard scholar, offered a new view of the difference between leadership and management. According to Kotter, managers are concerned with stability, efficiency and order, while leaders are concerned with innovation, adaptability and change. Despite this new focus, Kotter subtly builds Zaleznic’s view of warm, inspiring leaders and well-organized, task-focused managers into his own model. Kotter states that management is about planning and controlling, while leadership is about setting direction and motivating people to help them get there. Like Zaleznic, Kotter regards leadership and management as complementary roles. An organization that lacks good management is like a ship without an engine, while an organization without great leadership is like a ship without a rudder. Leaders steer their organization to new and exciting destinations, while managers make sure that everyone is fed along the way. Yet Kotter sees management and leadership as different roles, rather than different people. Individual executives can and should both manage and lead. These new leader-managers need to skilfully attend to both:

• the task at hand and the people completing it
• productivity in the present and positioning the organization for the future

Leadership and management are complementary parts of your job.