The main difference between leaders and managers is that leaders have people follow them while managers have people who work for them. A successful business owner needs to be both a strong leader and manager to get their team on board to follow them towards their vision of success.
Leadership is about getting people to understand and believe in your vision and to work with you to achieve your goals while managing is more about administering and making sure the day-to-day things are happening as they should. In order for you to engage your staff in providing the best service to your guests, clients or partners, you must enroll them in your vision and align their perceptions and behaviours.
In reality, you'll either be initially much better at one or the other: a good manager or a good leader. We rarely have someone good at both roles simultaneously; they are diametrically opposed.
But that's absolutely okay. The articles above seem to pit the 'leader' as a visionary who has fans, acts as a change agent, and thinks long-term; however, if every manager acted as a leader, nothing would ever get done.
Managers are important but they have to be trained like every employee to be technically competent at their job.
That's where management and project management training comes into play. You may be a manager or want to be one because you're a natural leader; however, great leaders often push themselves to develop enough management skills to get to where they want to go. If you're a natural leader or even if you aren't , you can learn the management theory to underpin your career; otherwise, even great visionaries may not be able to move up the business.
Understanding what good management looks like and understanding how to plan and manage a team are vital yet trainable skills. There's a theory called the Peter principle that posits that everyone rises through a business to a level of incompetence. In other words, they may be promoted because they are great in a technical role or capacity, but find it difficult to excel and progress further. A possible reason for this incompetence is often due to our approach to promotion, especially from technical to managerial roles.
Past performance or technical skill does not naturally transfer into the broad range of skills required to manage. They didn't have the support to be better at that role and to improve even further. Management is one of the only roles where companies assume employees will automatically know how to be successful in this technically difficult role and they nearly always don't.
You wouldn't let someone who wasn't a trained surgeon to operate on you, but you'll let people manage a team who weren't trained to do that task! At MOL, we understand the importance of training. We offer two specific programmes that help make your managers and leaders better at what they do.
The CMI Programme in Management and Leadership helps managers understand risk management, critical path planning, the project lifecycle, change management and more. There are great managers out there who have been trained to be excellent managers by basing their work on existing management theories.
Becoming a better manager through training means less stress, higher competence and mastery of measurable skills. Project managers often drive change. Our APM unit on 'leading a project' discusses the leadership skills needed to plan a project effectively and get stakeholders invested and on-board with change.
Get in touch with us today to find out more or read our latest news and case studies. For Business Contact Us. Conveyancing Conveyancing Overview Level 4 Level 6. They differ in motivation, personal history, and in how they think and act. Managers tend to adopt impersonal, if not passive, attitudes toward goals. Frederic G. We must design not just the cars we would like to build but, more important, the cars that our customers want to buy. Nowhere in this statement is there a notion that consumer tastes and preferences arise in part as a result of what manufacturers do.
In reality, through product design, advertising, and promotion, consumers learn to like what they then say they need. Few would argue that people who enjoy taking snapshots need a camera that also develops pictures. But in response to a need for novelty, convenience, and a shorter interval between acting snapping the picture and gaining pleasure seeing the shot , the Polaroid camera succeeded in the marketplace.
It is inconceivable that Edwin Land responded to impressions of consumer need. The example of Polaroid and Land suggests how leaders think about goals. They are active instead of reactive, shaping ideas instead of responding to them. Leaders adopt a personal and active attitude toward goals. The influence a leader exerts in altering moods, evoking images and expectations, and in establishing specific desires and objectives determines the direction a business takes.
The net result of this influence changes the way people think about what is desirable, possible, and necessary. Managers tend to view work as an enabling process involving some combination of people and ideas interacting to establish strategies and make decisions.
They help the process along by calculating the interests in opposition, planning when controversial issues should surface, and reducing tensions. Alfred P. The time was the early s when Ford Motor Company still dominated the automobile industry using, as did General Motors, the conventional water-cooled engine.
With the full backing of Pierre du Pont, Charles Kettering dedicated himself to the design of an air-cooled copper engine, which, if successful, would be a great technical and marketing coup for GM.
Kettering believed in his product, but the manufacturing division heads opposed the new design on two grounds: first, it was technically unreliable, and second, the corporation was putting all its eggs in one basket by investing in a new product instead of attending to the current marketing situation.
In the summer of , after a series of false starts and after its decision to recall the copper engine Chevrolets from dealers and customers, GM management scrapped the project. Alfred Sloan was all too aware that Kettering was unhappy and indeed intended to leave General Motors.
Sloan was also aware that, while the manufacturing divisions strongly opposed the new engine, Pierre du Pont supported Kettering. Further, Sloan had himself gone on record in a letter to Kettering less than two years earlier expressing full confidence in him. The problem Sloan had was how to make his decision stick, keep Kettering in the organization he was much too valuable to lose , avoid alienating du Pont, and encourage the division heads to continue developing product lines using conventional water-cooled engines.
First, he tried to reassure Kettering by presenting the problem in a very ambiguous fashion, suggesting that he and the executive committee sided with Kettering, but that it would not be practical to force the divisions to do what they were opposed to. He presented the problem as being a question of the people, not the product.
Second, he proposed to reorganize around the problem by consolidating all functions in a new division that would be responsible for the design, production, and marketing of the new engine. This solution appeared as ambiguous as his efforts to placate Kettering. Kettering, a kind of copper-cooled car division.
Kettering would designate his own chief engineer and his production staff to solve the technical problems of manufacture. Sloan did not discuss the practical value of this solution, which included saddling an inventor with management responsibility, but in effect, he used this plan to limit his conflict with Pierre du Pont. Essentially, the managerial solution that Sloan arranged limited the options available to others. The structural solution narrowed choices, even limiting emotional reactions to the point where the key people could do nothing but go along.
Kettering at some length this morning, and he agrees with us absolutely on every point we made. He appears to receive the suggestion enthusiastically and has every confidence that it can be put across along these lines. Sloan placated people who opposed his views by developing a structural solution that appeared to give something but in reality only limited options.
To get people to accept solutions to problems, managers continually need to coordinate and balance opposing views. Interestingly enough, this type of work has much in common with what diplomats and mediators do, with Henry Kissinger apparently an outstanding practitioner. Managers aim to shift balances of power toward solutions acceptable as compromises among conflicting values. Leaders work in the opposite direction. Where managers act to limit choices, leaders develop fresh approaches to long-standing problems and open issues to new options.
To be effective, leaders must project their ideas onto images that excite people and only then develop choices that give those images substance. John F. Is the leadership mystique merely a holdover from our childhood—from a sense of dependency and a longing for good and heroic parents?
This much-quoted statement forced people to react beyond immediate concerns and to identify with Kennedy and with important shared ideals. On closer scrutiny, however, the statement is absurd because it promises a position, which, if adopted, as in the Vietnam War, could produce disastrous results. Yet unless expectations are aroused and mobilized, with all the dangers of frustration inherent in heightened desire, new thinking and new choice can never come to light.
Leaders work from high-risk positions; indeed, they are often temperamentally disposed to seek out risk and danger, especially where the chance of opportunity and reward appears promising. From my observations, the reason one individual seeks risks while another approaches problems conservatively depends more on his or her personality and less on conscious choice.
For those who become managers, a survival instinct dominates the need for risk, and with that instinct comes an ability to tolerate mundane, practical work. Leaders sometimes react to mundane work as to an affliction. Managers prefer to work with people; they avoid solitary activity because it makes them anxious. Several years ago, I directed studies on the psychological aspects of careers. The need to seek out others with whom to work and collaborate seemed to stand out as an important characteristic of managers.
When asked, for example, to write imaginative stories in response to a picture showing a single figure a boy contemplating a violin or a man silhouetted in a state of reflection , managers populated their stories with people.
His instrument was ordered and had just arrived. The boy is weighing the alternatives of playing football with the other kids or playing with the squeak box. Football season is now over, but a good third baseman will take the field next spring. This story illustrates two themes that clarify managerial attitudes toward human relations. The first, as I have suggested, is to seek out activity with other people that is, the football team , and the second is to maintain a low level of emotional involvement in those relationships.
In this case, the boy, Mom, and Dad agree to give up the violin for sports. These two themes may seem paradoxical, but their coexistence supports what a manager does, including reconciling differences, seeking compromises, and establishing a balance of power. The story further demonstrates that managers may lack empathy, or the capacity to sense intuitively the thoughts and feelings of others.
Consider another story written to the same stimulus picture by someone thought of as a leader by his peers:. Empathy is not simply a matter of paying attention to other people. It is also the capacity to take in emotional signals and make them meaningful in a relationship.
Managers relate to people according to the role they play in a sequence of events or in a decision-making process, while leaders, who are concerned with ideas, relate in more intuitive and empathetic ways. In recent years, managers have adopted from game theory the notion that decision-making events can be one of two types: the win-lose situation or zero-sum game or the win-win situation in which everybody in the action comes out ahead.
Managers strive to convert win-lose into win-win situations as part of the process of reconciling differences among people and maintaining balances of power. As an illustration, take the decision of how to allocate capital resources among operating divisions in a large, decentralized organization. On the surface, the dollars available for distribution are limited at any given time.
Presumably, therefore, the more one division gets, the less is available for other divisions. Managers tend to view this situation as it affects human relations as a conversion issue: how to make what seems like a win-lose problem into a win-win problem. From that perspective, several solutions come to mind. Here the players become engrossed in the bigger problem of how to make decisions, not what decisions to make. Once committed to the bigger problem, these people have to support the outcome since they were involved in formulating the decision-making rules.
Because they believe in the rules they formulated, they will accept present losses, believing that next time they will win. Signals are inconclusive and subject to reinterpretation should people become upset and angry; messages involve the direct consequence that some people will indeed not like what they hear. The nature of messages heightens emotional response and makes managers anxious. With signals, the question of who wins and who loses often becomes obscured.
Third, the manager plays for time. Compromises mean that one may win and lose simultaneously, depending on which of the games one evaluates.
There are undoubtedly many other tactical moves managers use to change human situations from win-lose to win-win. But the point is that such tactics focus on the decision-making process itself, and that process interests managers rather than leaders. Tactical interests involve costs as well as benefits; they make organizations fatter in bureaucratic and political intrigue and leaner in direct, hard activity and warm human relationships. Consequently, one often hears subordinates characterize managers as inscrutable, detached, and manipulative.
In contrast, one often hears leaders referred to with adjectives rich in emotional content.
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