Leadership Versus Management
Fashions change, over the past twenty years we have stopped valuing management and started to value leadership. In an effort to promote leadership, businesses around the country have rechristend their “senior management teams” as “senior leadership teams”. I even worked for an organisation that insisted that all managers were called leaders, presumably in the vain hope that it would improve business results. It wasn’t the most successful change initiative I have ever seen.
Claiming to be a manager is passé, being a leader is much more 21st century. Would you rather your boss sent you to a “leadership course” or a “management course”? Leadership is where it is at, at least as far as your C.V. is concerned.
Is There a Difference?
I read a quote today whilst working through the definitions. It is profound but not very helpful.
Good leaders manage and good managers lead.
Henry Mintzberg
A more useful statement (which I wish I could claim as my own, but I’m not that clever) is, “Management is about process — leadership is about purpose”.
Leadership is defining the what and why, and management is working through the how, where and when.
Leadership without management is an exercise in wheel spinning, as nothing gets done. Management without good leadership can take you into all sorts of ill-thought-through, unpleasant directions, as history will attest. Neither is much use without the other.
Henry Mintzberg’s comment was more helpful than I thought.
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