Leaders are Managers, but Managers are not necessarily Leaders…………

Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think. Leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action. Each has its own function and characteristic activities. Both are necessary for success in an increasingly complex and volatile business environment. In any work environment there is a power hierarchy. It provides structure, direction and guidance within them.

Everyone can’t be good at both leading and managing. Some people have the capacity to become excellent managers but not strong leaders. Others have great leadership potential but, for a variety of reasons, have great difficulty becoming strong managers. The two most popular stereotypes in such an environment is leaders and Managers. Leaders are people who inspire and encourage others to work for a common goal. Whereas a manager is person who manages resources in order to deliver the required work in a timely, efficient and effective manner.

Management develops the capacity to achieve its plan by organizing and staffing–creating an organizational structure and set of jobs for accomplishing plan requirements, divide the jobs with qualified individuals, communicating the plan to those people, delegating responsibility for carrying out the plan, and create systems to monitor implementation. The equivalent leadership activity, however, is aligning people. This means communicating the new direction to those who can create coalitions that understand the vision and are committed to its achievement. Finally, management ensures plan accomplishment by controlling and problem solving, monitoring results versus the plan in some detail, both formally and informally, by means of reports, meetings, and other tools; identifying deviations; and then planning and organizing to solve the problems. But for leadership, achieving a vision requires motivating and inspiring, keeping people moving in the right direction, despite major obstacles to change, by appealing to basic but often untapped human needs, values, and emotions (Northouse, 2016).

A leader can be a manager, where he or she can lead the team while managing other resources as budget and work activities to meet the deadline, and deliver customer requirement successfully, while also maintaining cordial and inspiring relations with the team members.

A manager on other hand may or may not be a leader, he or she could be a boss who just provides orders rather than engaging and encouraging team to deliver the required outcome. In other words, he would rather manage all resources (considering his team as workers rather than a team) to deliver the work in a timely, efficient, and effective manner.

In considering the terminology with respect to change, Leadership is about coping with change whereas management is coping with complexity. In modern context I think that both management and leadership are equally important for the success of any organization.

References

Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications,.