Leadership Attitude

Managers and leaders are different: “Manager’s goals arise out of necessities rather than desires; they excel at diffusing conflicts between individuals and departments, placating all sides while ensuring that an organisation’s day-to-day business gets done. Leaders, on the other hand, adopt personal, active attitudes towards goals. They look for the potential opportunities and rewards that lie around the corner, inspiring subordinates and firing up the creative process with their own energy. Their relationships with employees and coworkers are intense.”

So says Abraham Zaleznik in his seminal Harvard Business Review article, “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?”, Reprint 92211, Apr 1992. His central argument was that businesses need both managers and leaders to survive but with too much management and not enough leadership, “a business will stagnate and rapidly lose competitive power.” He categorises three main attitudes where leadership can be differentiated from management: attitudes to goals, to work and to others.

Here’s a summary followed by further implications (“et alors”).

Leadership Attitude

Attitudes towards goals

·         Managers’ goals will be impersonal and deeply embedded in their company’s culture and history.

·         Leaders adopt a personal attitude towards goals. By altering moods, evoking images and expectations and in establishing specific desires, the leader influences the way people think about what is possible, desirable and necessary.

Attitudes towards work

·         Managers coordinate and balance opposing views. Whilst diplomatic, managers can limit choices.

·         Leaders adopt fresh approaches to long-standing problems and open issues to new options. New thinking and new choices are proposed.  Entrepreneurial and risk seeking, leaders are likely to become intolerant of mundane work.

Attitudes towards others

·         Managers seek out activity with other people but maintain a low level of emotional involvement.

·         Leaders focus on what the events and decisions mean to participants. Empathetic, leaders take in emotional signals and attract strong feelings of identity. Relating on a one-to-one rather than one-to-many basis can increase individual motivations.

Et alors?

It seems in some ways that these attitudes are contradictory and yet management and leadership are not mutually exclusive. The idea here regarding the attitudes is that the manager / leader can adopt one attitude at a time and as appropriate. Sometimes it is fully appropriate to be a manager: to solve problems in an objective and impersonal manner; other times it is more appropriate to be a leader:  to be personally implicated in the goals, and consider how new options affect others.

Sometimes the organizational culture might exhibit “management” rather than “leadership” attitudes. Some managers might therefore feel inhibited in demonstrating leadership attitudes; however this is the advantage of being able to apply the relevant attitude as appropriate. During the day-to-day course of business, during reporting and managing “upwards”, the leader can be a manager; when however there are projects to run, changes to be made and staff to be motivated the leader can be a leader!