Management Vs. Leadership: The Hard Work Of A Manager

Management vs. Leadership this debate is going on now for a few years. Management is said to be the discipline that helps the organization to maintain its status quo, brings stability to the firm’s activities and targets, and handles the individuals/team members within the boundaries set to accomplish the goals. These boundaries are nothing but time, quality, money, machines, people, and anything else related to the project. It is a subject in which one needs to be pragmatic and wise and requires to use a set of skills and techniques. Leadership, on the other hand, focuses on giving a new direction to the team members, innovating different ways to motivate the people, and are concerned with defining new goals. We can classify it by specific behaviors like sharing vision, making people believe in themselves, creating a favorable environment for work, and making necessary changes. Leadership is not about what skills/power we have but about how we use it to accomplish the tasks and to understand others (Madsen. S., 2015).

Both the disciplines involve influencing, working with individuals/Teams and has a common goal. The main difference between these two disciplines, Management and Leadership, is their distinct approaches to driving individuals and groups to accomplish the goals. Managers have trust in their authority and have defined each group member their tasks according to the set boundaries to finish the work. Contrarily, leaders work with each person individually tries to boost them and want to get the best out of each person by assigning him personal tasks to those of the organization. Leadership and Management are being used in organizations every day, different features and responsibilities identify them, but for organization success connection between them is essential (Nixon. P., Harrington. M., Parker. D., 2012). The project manager's tasks are to handle complexity, including planning, budgeting, organizing, while the leader's job is to control the change, including vision, directing, and motivating (Kotter. J. P., 1990b). Leaders verbalize a vision for long term goals while the managers try their best to help the organization grow in the present (Lunenburg, 2011).

The main characteristics that differentiate project leaders from project managers are; Manager creates a project plan and tells how and when to do things, focuses on processes and procedures, works within the organizational boundaries, and people or team members do what project manager asks because they have to. On the other hand, Leader creates a vision and strategy and tells what an organization requires, he challenges the organizational boundaries, his focus is on people their ideas and commitments, and people obey his orders because they want to. Both the leadership and management take place within the organization’s surroundings, but it is said that leadership is more flexible and open to new and more creative ideas while the management is rigid and goes for tested approaches. In the below figure some of the main differencЙФes between leadership and management are mentioned.

Leadership leans on personal power, face to face communication between the leader and followers, influencing the followers, creating a friendly environment, and helping the followers to achieve their potential. People want to follow the leader for many positive reasons such as trust in leaders, an opportunity to excel in their career, to gain success (Maccoby, 2000). The followers bolster the leader’s powers, and in return, the leader helps people by using his values. In contract, Management depends upon their positional power, authority, decision making. Managers are unbiased and rely on numerous of different documents. Their position justifies their authority, and they motivate team members on the reward and reinforcement point of view.

Many people are both, they have the management jobs, but they cannot force the members to follow them, at this time they need to act as a leader and make the individuals believe in them. Managers have subordinates; their focus is on getting work done while leaders have followers; their focus is on task and people. Authoritarian, transactional style is most suited for managers as the organization has given them authority; they have subordinates working under them. For leaders, charismatic, transformational style is best suited as they inspire, help people to do better in their tasks.

To conclude, The organization will only be successful if it has both strong leadership and strong Management. In today’s world, organizations need leaders to handle new challenges and help organizations modify in order to have a competitive advantage in the market. It also needs managers to ensure all the operations are functioning smoothly and perform within the specified resources. Finally, leaders and managers are vital for an organization to succeed.