2. Management Versus Leadership

Communication Skill

Communicating with Internal and External Stakeholders 

Communicating leadership  

Source: Adapted from Kotter (1990)

To begin, there is a difference between being a manager and a leader.  Ideally, you will choose to act as a leader-manager, or a manager who acts as a leader.

Clearly, managers need to know how to manage:  they need to know how to set and accomplish goals as well as how to organize and direct a staff.  The best managers also know how to lead a staff, which includes an ability to envision a better future for a organization and working groups and an ability to bring people together to accomplish goals.   By comparing management and leadership functions, the relationship between them becomes clearer.  In each of the following, notice that a leader must move beyond the mere function of her/his job as a manger to develop deeper skills as a “people knower” and “people motivator”. 

A leader-manager needs to balance both managerial and leadership functions:

Planning and Budgeting Versus Establishing Direction:  The planning and budgeting process requires the establishment of detailed steps and deadlines for achieving needed results, followed by the allocation of resources necessary to make the plan happen.  In addition, a leader-manager establishes direction by developing a vision of the future—often a distant future—and developing strategies for producing the changes needed to achieve that vision.

Organizing and Staffing Versus Aligning People:  To organize and staff, a manager must:

•            establish some structure for accomplishing plan requirements

•            staff that structure with individuals

•            delegate responsibility and authority for carrying out the plan

•            provide policies and procedure to help guide people

•            create methods or systems to monitor implementation

In addition, a leader-manager must also communicate direction in words and deeds to all those whose cooperation may be needed AND must also influence the creation of teams that understand the vision and strategies and accept their validity.

Controlling and Problem Solving Versus Motivating and Inspiring:  To control and problem solve means that a manager must monitor results, identify deviations from the plan and then plan and organize to solve these problems.  To motivate and inspire, a leader-manager must also energize people to overcome major political, bureaucratic and resource barriers to change by satisfying basic, but often unfulfilled, human needs.

2. Consequences of Management Versus Leadership

Source: Adapted from Kotter

The primary consequence of acting solely as a manager is that one is able to produce a degree of predictability and order.  A manager also has the potential to consistently produce the short-term results expected by various stakeholders such as meeting deadlines and staying within budget.  Clearly, the aforementioned are important goals.  After all, a effective marketplace requires careful attention to the bottom line. 

Yet, by acting as a leader-manager, you are able to produce change, often to a dramatic degree.  Furthermore, a leader-manager has the potential to produce extremely useful change, such as creating new services or products that stakeholders want, as well as developing new approaches to staff relations that help make an organization more adaptive and effective.  Without question, these consequences are equally important for project/programme purpose success, particularly when moving from a regulated to a effective market.

Clearly, both roles are important.  The question is, how does a manager know when to focus on control and predictability and when to focus on adapting to change?  The following case study address the balance that needs to be struck.