What’s the difference between the two, if any? :rolleyes:
Leaders establish goals and set out the courses needed to reach those goals.
Management watches the resources being used to conduct business and tries to ensure that they are not exhausted.
U.S. business (not to exclude that of other countries) is full of managers who cannot lead (and are not judged on their abilities to lead). A leader who cannot manage can be as harmful to an organization as a manager who cannot lead, expending resources that are needed for daily survival in pursuit of an unreached goal, but managers who cannot lead result in organizations that simply run in place without actually accomplishing anything.
tomndebb nailed it.
I recall reading one of those bullshit theory things awhile back that used a lot of graphs to reconstruct the ideal mix.
There were basically two extremes of each, giving one the box. Too much leadership, not enough management gave you an idealistic corp that crashed pretty quickly (worked for one of those myself). Too much management and not enough leadership gave you a bureaucracy where nothing ever got done to move the company forward. Too little of either resulted in anarchy and the last corner…was “synergy” where there were just enough rules to keep the idealistic streak in check and just enough idealism that people knew where to go.
Finding the right amount of both is difficult, of course.
Hope that helps.
I think leadership in most situations deals with being able to encourage behavior that is beneficial, and management is directing those energies holistically. Management without leadership is, I think, quite common. Instead of encouraging good behavior, bad behavior is punished. This promotes mediocrity, IMO. There is an entire spectrum of performance; you are not guaranteed to have good behavior simply by discouraging a set of “bad” behavior. I think a lot of it also has to do with the monies or other resources available. In an industry like fast food, you only really need satisfactory performance and you won’t get a better product by giving people huge raises based on good performance. In an industry like pharmaceuticals that has huge resources, competition for good workers can lead to better solutions.
Leadership is Captain Kirk saying “Set course for Alpha Quintar at warp 6.”
Management is Ensign Chekov making sure the Enterprise doesn’t get lost doing so.
During the Revolutionary War, a general came across a company of men and their captain trying to move a log that was blocking the road. As the captain stood there in his nice clean uniform yelling at his men to work harder, the general dismounted from his horse to grab end end and help push. When the obstruction was cleared the general asked the captain “why the shit didn’t you help move the log?”. Puzzled, the captain replied “I’m a captain…I don’t push logs!”
“Bitch!!..I’m George marthafucking Washington!!!” replied the General.
- George Washington may or may not have called the captain a bitch.
Which is that supposed to be? A diatribe against the dangers of military pagentry?
Just as there can be management without leadership, there can be leadership without management. My company has a lot of top technical people who don’t have any reports, but report directly to high level folks. In fact we reorged a while ago splitting managers (who got lots of reports) from technical leaders (who got none.) Works pretty well so far.
Transactional versus Transformational
My colorful paraphrasing aside, it is a fairly common parable on the diference between “leadership” and “management”. The captain is a “manager”. He does not care about the end goal (removing the obstruction), only his place in the chain of command and the execution of policy. George Washington, is held up as an example of “leadership”. He leads by example. He gets his hands dirty. He understands that achieving the goal is more important than maintaining the trapings of his title and position.
In a way, yes, it is a diatribe against the dangers of “pagentry”, military, business or otherwise. It is a warning that a leader should never be too far removed from the people he/she leads lest they loose touch with the big picture.
I understand your point, but one of the biggest problems a new manager has is getting his or her hands too dirty. New managers often get promoted since they are better at doing the work than others, but if they fall into the trap of doing things instead of letting their new reports do them they are neither good leaders or good managers.
I’ve got another couple of endings. For one thing, how much additional help could one man be over a company. Perhaps General Washington, being both a manager and a leader, knew that there was another company just up ahead, and rode off to order them to go back and help move the log.
Or, would he be a great leader if, by stopping to help move the log, he was late to his headquarters, and was unable to give the orders to win the next battle?
Doing is simple - leadership is hard.
Doing is hard. Leadership is hard. Standing around telling other people what to do is easy.
Your point is taken though. A leader who is unable to delegate is almost as bad as one who does nothing. Micromanagement is usually a sign of an inexperienced leader or one who does not trust their subordinates to carry out a task.
Yes, you can take the story and say something to the effect that Washington should have ordered the captain to help out or delegated the task to someone else and not gotten himself bogged down in the weeds. That isn’t the point of the story though. The point is that a leader “leads”. A manager punches out at six while the rest of the team is working until midnight to complete a deadline.
I’ve heard of them, but that’s not been my experience. I’ve had a few really bad managers, and seen some others, and most of them worked really long hours. Most people who’ve been promoted understand the culture of an organization, and fit in well to it, and if the culture is stay late, they do. Sometimes it would be better for the team if they did go home, but that’s another story.
Basically I disagree that (good) managing is easy. Leadership is seeing a direction for a group and getting the group there. Management is more building a team and helping that team be efficient. There are plenty of jobs that don’t really need leadership, since the job is well defined and static. A poor manager makes a group doing that job unhappy and inefficient, with high turnover, lots of fighting, I know of some people who are leaders in the sense that they have a clear, and well stated, direction for their group - but who are rotten managers, in that people in the group have low morale and are leaving left and right. They also do not sell their goals well to the rest of the world.
Reviewing the thread, tomndebb still nailed it. If a leader can’t manage he or she needs to partner with someone who can. If a manager isn’t a good leader, she should just stick to her business, and get direction from her boss. It sounds to me like you’ve never had a good manager.
I work in consulting…so no, I haven’t.