Leadership Vs Management

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Strong leadership is an important foundation for success. Organisations need to understand their leadership vs management requirements, but sometimes fail because they lack the knowledge and resources to develop the required set of leaders. After all leaders define the vision, align differing viewpoints, and motivate during the pursuit of a goal.

There are reasons why this can be difficult:

Firstly organizations typically have a myriad of management layers, guidelines, and practices, all of which are important for the day-to-day functioning of the business. However, because these processes are often focused on the short-term, they do not reflect the company's overall long-term objectives.

Companies depend too much on training and deploying managers throughout their organizations and too little on having the required leadership to direct these management processes to successfully grow

Secondly situations change and so do the leadership requirements. The roles and responsibilities, styles, and actions of leaders need to constantly adapt to your given market and internal realities. What you needed ...
... in your start up stage may be quite different from what is need now the company is growing larger.

Thirdly management tends to come a bit more naturally to most of us compared to leadership. After all as a manager you have status and position power, as a leader you get things done largely by your personal influence.

How do you decide what is needed in leadership versus management?

Leadership and management are distinct and yet complementary, however when talking about leadership versus management remember that the terms that are often misunderstood and misused..

Leadership is about influencing others ""to do the right things"" in terms of the big picture and medium to long term. Management is more about control and getting people to ""do things right"" in the short to medium term, it is more about quality and consistency

Work in a high growth company or operate in a highly dynamic market place context? Then you will typically have a significant requirement for strong leaders and managers. Recognizing this is a first step towards creating an environment that develops these individuals.

On the other hand, the need for managers is directly related to the increase in business complexity. As your company moves up the growth curve, the complexity of your organization grows. There are more stakeholders, both internal and external; more interactions; more processes; and generally more at stake. You need managers who can plan, are detail-oriented, and have a focus on execution to ensure that you do not lose sight of key priorities.

Having strong leadership and capable management is critical to your company's success, but there must also be an appropriate balance of the two. Like most companies, yours will have strong managers if you have established the well-grounded systems and training programs to develop people to fill managerial roles. But have you done the same for leadership?

Too much management with not enough leadership can lead to a narrow minded and bureaucratic organization; while too much leadership with not enough management can lead to an organization that is too unstructured and consistently fails to execute to plan.
What leadership management mix do you need?

Graham Hart has been working for over 20 years with leaders and their teams as an Executive Coach , facilitator and consultant. He is passionate about leadership learning and change in our work places. So much so that he makes a living out of helping leaders create positive change for themselves, their teams and their organisations. He shares his ideas , tips and tools on Leopard-Learninghe also writes and presents on the topic of individual and organisational learning. For a free ebook check out The learning Company