BUS603: Managing People

The terms leadership and management are often used interchangeably. This regularly leads to a belief that leadership and management cover the same aspects which cannot be further from the truth. Leadership is a more elusive concept than management. In leadership the key concepts are about influencing and knowing how to appropriately incentivize someone. This is not to be confused with management which is more transactional and concentrated on efficiencies than effectiveness. Also, management is about control; it is about having checks and balances in place to properly measure success, while leadership is about the people and relationships and how best to utilize them to reach a common goal. Leaders are concentrated on "innovation" where new ideas are brought to the forefront and treated as a highly valued skill derived from a creativity aspect.

These differences between leadership and management can be further described in the way managers and leaders see the future. Managers see the future as a bottom line, in other words as a short-term financial goal. Leaders see the horizon, they see the aspirational goal of moving the organization in a certain direction that will lead to a long standing competitive advantage. Finally, these aspirational goals that move the organization are not truly effective without the accumulation of followers (and their engagement). Having these organic followers is another key distinction between manager and followers. Alberto Silva of Keiser University recently defined this organic follower aspect of leadership the following way, "Leadership is the process of interactive influence that occurs when, in a given context, some people accept someone as their leader to achieve common goals".

I have personally been confused about the differences between leaders and managers and, until recently, used them interchangeably. I also considered managers to be lesser than leaders and considered the evolution of an individual to be at an end state of a leader with the manager state being necessary but quick, as the final goal was to be a leader. Through my research, I have learned that not only are managers and leaders two different things, but being an effective manager can be very rewarding and necessary for certain instances. For example, in my previous role, I was a manager of operations which required constant feedback from my direct hires and metrics to be established to understand if we were hitting the benchmarks we had determined. My operations role involved thousands of transactions and several audit checks to make sure our efficiency was accurate. This type of work could only be done by a manager that can assess quickly, think short-term and always consider efficiencies/effectiveness as a cost reduction measure. A leader in this type of role might lose track of the daily transactions and be fatigued by the rigidness and certainty of each day's deliverables.