Management is not Leadership

The difference between management and leadership is often overlooked and rarely clarified. In the press, “leadership” can be presented as a headline subject in itself, especially in the business news where journalists can be found asking “what is (or what went) wrong” with a particular company? However, in attempting to reply to that question, the analysis is often a consideration of management (rather than leadership). The professor who wrote a book which reviewed the differences between the two (“What Leaders Really Do”, 1999) was recently interviewed along those same lines by the BBC. Following that interview, Prof. J Kotter commented further as to why to consider the two the same is a mistake: Harvard Business Review blog post, “Management is (Still) Not Leadership”, 9.1.13 (accessed 13.2.13).

Here’s a summary of why it is a mistake to consider management and leadership the same followed by further implications (“et alors”).

Management is not Leadership

Kotter asserts that the confusion between the two is “massive, and that misunderstanding gets in the way of any reasonable discussion about how to build a company, position it for success and win in the twenty-first century.” There are three principle mistakes.

Mistake #1: presumed synonymy

The two words are not synonymous. To use them “interchangeably” underlines the key problem that the crucial difference between the “vital functions that each role plays” is not understood…

…in fact, whilst management can be mainly associated with planning, staffing and controlling, leadership is about vision, empowerment and producing useful change.

Mistake #2: leadership is only at the “top”

“Leadership” is used to refer to the people at the very top of hierarchies; lower layers are management; and then the rest are workers. This is very misleading…

… in fact, in an ever-faster-moving world, leadership is increasingly needed from people from all parts of the hierarchy. To consider leadership only at the top is a “recipe for failure”.

Mistake #3: leadership is about charisma

People often associate leadership with charisma and further that since few people have great charisma “few people can provide leadership, which gets us into increasing trouble…”

… in fact, “leadership is not about attributes, it’s about behavior”. In particular, leadership is associated with finding opportunities and successfully exploiting those opportunities.

Et alors

As here and elsewhere, Kotter highlights that a lot of organizations are “over-managed and under-led”; however his message is not that management should be replaced by leadership – instead he states that good organizations need both “superb” management and “superb” leadership. Complex organizations can be made both reliable and efficient by “management” but should also be taken into the future ahead of the competition by collective “leadership” through constant change.  If however "leadership" and "management" are mistakenly considered the same, then every time an organization needs more leadership all that will happen is that it will only “work harder to manage”…