Many people confuse leadership and management. They might share some similarities, but they are two very different things and require different qualities for success.
Leadership is about getting others to want to follow your lead, while management is about ensuring that everyone does their job correctly.
Let’s discuss the differences between these two concepts in more detail and show you how you can become a more effective leader at work and in all aspects of your life.
What is management?
Simply put, management is about making sure that all your employees do their job correctly and on time. This includes all aspects of the job, from planning to organizing and executing a plan to managing employees as they work on tasks that need completing.
All these things are vital for an organization’s day-to-day running to move forward, get things done, and serve their customers.
What is leadership?
We can think of leadership generally as influencing people by providing direction, support, and motivation so that followers want to take action themselves without any coercion. Leadership is about inspiring others to want to follow your lead.
Leadership comes in many forms and can apply to all aspects of life, not just work. If you think about the great leaders in history, they were all charismatic, visionary people who mobilized others around a common problem.
And to a different degree, those are the same qualities that a leader in the workplace needs to show. They generate excitement for what needs doing or for shared goals and create an emotional connection with their followers to get them on board.
What are the differences between a manager and a leader?
You don’t have to be a manager of anything to be a leader. Management is about what you do; leading is who you are.
Here are some areas where we can see the differences between the two.
• Titles. Leaders may not always have formal authority over their subordinates, but they still possess influence through other means such as personal charisma. Management has a more hierarchical control structure, whereas leadership does not require one-on-one dependency for success.
Very often, you can see leaders who do not have a formal title but have earned the team’s respect. This is the case when you find a team member or a newcomer leading the rest, or even employees leading up and their bosses following.
And a leader might be a recognized authority on one topic but might follow another’s lead on another project.
• Direction. Leaders have a vision and assume responsibility for leading their team to achieve that vision. They provide a sense of direction, as well as support and motivation.
Managers are less focused on the remote future goals and more on the short-term daily tasks needed to run an organization.
• Productivity. The productivity of an organization is fundamentally related to the quality and effectiveness of management (the planning, organizing, and executing of that plan).
In contrast, leadership does not necessarily have a direct, measurable correlation with productivity because they are not as involved in the daily tasks that each team member has to perform.
• Motivation. By having a hierarchical relationship with the workers, managers motivate them through the traditional HR tools such as pay, promotion, and other rewards.
Leaders tend to be more focused on personal, internal motivation, often outside of the context of work.
For example, they can motivate followers to do something by providing meaning or purpose in life that isn’t related to completing tasks at work but instead focused on the satisfaction of helping build something bigger than themselves.
• Vision. Leaders have a vision and work to inspire others to follow them to carry out that vision with their support and guidance. Whereas managers are less focused on the remote future goals and more on the daily grind.
• Growth. By being more task-focused, managers will want their employees to acquire and develop the skills they need to perform their job. Good leaders will focus on making their team grow, individually and as a group, so that everyone can develop their maximum potential. By developing their team, leaders are effectively shaping more future leaders, which means that the team will have more capacity in the future to do great things.
Do companies need both managers and leaders?
The short answer is yes. A company needs both managers and leaders to achieve success. To get things done and meet the immediate business needs, a manager is often required to use his hierarchical position to put pressure on employees and make them deliver.
But without leaders, it’s easy for employees to miss the big picture of where they fit in, making them get frustrated and lose motivation.
Without leaders, it’s also challenging to grow a business sustainably, as their vision can help both the company and its employees adapt to the changing circumstances and dream bigger in terms of their goals. It all comes down to balance – one cannot exist without the other because they work together by addressing both short-term needs (e.g., executing tasks) and, at the same time, long-term goals (e.g., creating meaning and driving the future).
It’s also essential that companies have a balance between managers and leaders at all levels of the organization so that they can maximize productivity and provide inspiration to all employees.
Here’s the trick, though. Although a leader doesn’t necessarily need to have a role that gives them a hierarchical position over the team, it can be the case that a manager is also a leader. That title is not given, it’s earned, but over time a good manager can earn the trust and respect of the employees. If they also have a vision and can inspire others to follow them, they have effectively become a leader.
This is what all organizations should aspire to, that every employee develops their leadership skills to their maximum potential.
