Leadership and Management

Is Being a Leader the Same or Different As Being a Manager?

Is Being a Leader the Same or Different As Being a Manager?

Introduction

Leadership and management are two terms that are often confused: what is the difference between them? John Kotter, the Harvard Business School, says that management is responsible for managing the complexity. Good management imposes order and consistency in planning formal, rigid design organizational structures and compares the results with those plans.

Leadership, by contrast, refers to managing exchange. Leaders set the direction with a vision of the future. Then, to summon the staff, we communicate this vision and inspiring them to overcome obstacles.

Robert House, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, agrees when he says that managers exercise authority conferred upon them by their rank to gain the allegiance of the members of the organization. The management is to implement the vision and strategy provided by leaders, coordinating and staffing the organization and deal with everyday problems. This is the difference between a leader and a manager or manager. The director or manager is not only leading the force has given the administration, hierarchy or economic power, but does not reach the heart of people.

The director or manager manages resources (among other humans), but not a leader of men and women, or touches the deepest chords of human motivation.

Hence the failure of many managers who see humans as another resource (HR), and therefore believe that the motivation of individuals occurs in the surface level of a salary or spanked. They do not understand human nature. There are leaders, has done the inner work of knowing themselves, or to create a vision for their organizations and employees that is rooted in the deepest feelings of vital meaning and transcendence, sense of service and improvement of an ethics commitment and solidarity.

Discussion

All company, group or institution must have at their command, leaders and managers. When these two behavioral profiles are found in the same person, we can say that one of the objects of desire of management was conquered.

The manager is for the organization as the left hemisphere of the brain is to our thinking. He serves on the rational, mathematical and organizational, while the right hemisphere is responsible for our emotions, our motivation and our creativity, factors that characterize the leader.

These differences help us to understand better the pitch that exists between leaders and managers, as well as the need to make them complementary, not mutually exclusive.

If the manager is right, the leader is emotional, if the manager is objectivity, subjectivity is the leader, if the manager is the power, the leader's authority. If the manager is assigned a position the leader's legitimacy. If the manager is obedience, the leader's commitment.

Although this analogy between brain and management, the quality of what we produce in terms of thoughts and ideas is related to the level of 'conversation' that our two cerebral hemispheres are able to maintain, as the synergy between 'emotion' and 'rule' established, knowing that at times it is needed and not in others.

The synergy between the management factor (ratio) and the leadership ...