Achieving business victory calls for diverse individuals to handle diverse functions for organisational operations to be handled as planned. While some roles are easy to define, others may at times have confusing boundaries due to their vague nature. An example of a case where such confusion may arise is differentiating between a leader and a manager.
Management and leadership have an imperative function in getting things done. However, both of them have varying aspects with respect to the role they play and their impact. This claim does not imply that one cannot play both roles simultaneously. It is possible for one to be a leader and a manager at the same time performing both roles. However, it is worth noting that being a great leader does not necessarily imply that such a person makes a phenomenal leader and vice versa. For this reason, it is paramount for people to get a clear understanding of the fundamental differences between management and leadership if they are to get a clear picture of how they can fair in their roles as managers or leaders. This knowledge may enable them to acquire relevant skills in performing and achieving success in their functions. This article seeks to explore the practical and theoretical significance of separating management and leadership to improve organisational effectiveness.
One of the fundamental differences between a leader and a manager is that a manager administers while a leader innovates. This distinction implies that a head is usually bestowed with the duty of raising new opinions, which are meant to take the organisation into a chapter of ensuring that the set goals and objectives are realized. Hence, the head must always guarantee success in the organisation. This agenda keeps all workers motivated when they get the news that the organisation is accomplishing its key agenda, thanks to the employee efforts. There is a need for a leader to be someone who ensures that he or she has proper knowledge of the latest skills, research findings, and trends.
Much of the knowledge that leaders may have acquired in school to complement their functions often need modification on their part in order to achieve the effectiveness that is expected of a leader as he or she always has to be a step ahead of the rest at all times. On the other hand, an administrator’s role is to execute all key deliverables that the head has set for the organisation. He or she has to maintain focus on the bottom line. The manager has to maintain control to avert any organisational disorder. In fact, an administrator must work closely with all workers to ensure that what each of them is doing translates into the achievement of the company’s vision.
To achieve this goal, a manager has to understand the people that he or she is working with and get to know their passions and interests. He or she is then able to build a team out of such people through decisions that relate to placement, promotion, pay, and communication with them as a team. The manager tends to use the authority that comes with his or her position to get things done. At times, a manager is required to make strict orders that have to be adhered to by those that he or she is managing, whether they feel encouraged to abide by them or not.
A leader is someone who inspires trust among people whom he or she leads. Leadership is not merely about what one does as a leader. Rather, it is about what other people do in response to one’s actions. It involves influencing one’s other people to be his or her followers and to act or conduct themselves in a way that reflects the leader’s expectations. A good leader is someone who will always tend to have people around him or her. Such people must be interested in whatever the leader is doing, his or her plans, and/or what he or she has to say. People tend to associate themselves with leaders. As a result, they will often make an effort to attend their events or functions in which they are scheduled to deliver a speech. For this reason, if a person who considers him or herself a leader organised a function and people fail to attend, this outcome points to his or her shortcomings as a leader.
Further, the management of a project varies significantly from empowering other people into doing something that comes with leadership. Whereas a leader may ask about what can be done and why it needs to be done, a manager may tend to ask how something happened and when it took place. A leader needs to be in a position to question the occurrence of certain actions, something that may involve challenging his or her superiors. For this reason, leaders need to have the ability to face the top management whenever they feel that there is something else that needs to be performed for the organisation. Leaders do not expect to be always right since all people make mistakes at certain points in time. When a organisation they are leading experiences failure, leaders are expected to come in and explain why the failure took place, ask others for their opinions on why they think the failure may have taken place, and the lessons gained from the experience. Leaders will ask their teams to give their suggestions on how the organisation can use the information gained to approach their goals better.
Managers rarely deliberate on the meaning of failure. They tend to operate like soldiers while ensuring that they implement the plan accordingly. They understand the significance of plans and orders. Their work is to maintain their vision on the current organisational goals. Understanding the difference between manager and a leader is important, especially for a person who is in charge of a team in an organisation or the whole organisation. In the technological industry where creativity and innovation are a necessity, it is crucial for people who hold top positions to comprehend the nature of their roles and how such roles influence the progress of their organisations in achieving their objectives.
Specialist employees in the technological industry tend to work better with leadership since it gives them the room and time to exercise their creativity and innovativeness, which directly influence the organisation’s success. The inspirational aspect of business makes it appropriate in setting technology developers in the right mood that improves their innovativeness. However, some form of management aspects can be helpful in meeting certain targets that may require some degree of control on the activities of the employees. If leaders and managers can borrow from each other some management and leadership aspects respectively, they can achieve unprecedented success in their roles. However, this achievement may take time since being good in both functions is not easy due to the conflict that arises between leadership and management roles. The conflict makes it hard for one to balance between the two. Nonetheless, the best managers turn out to be good leaders to some extent in some cases. However, for greater efficiency within an organisation, it is preferable for different persons to be put in place to play management and leadership roles.
To understand the usefulness of separating leadership from management, one can take an example of the giant social site company, Facebook. The firm acknowledges the difference in strengths that leadership and management have. The company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is a proven leader. However, the firm needs someone who has strong supervisory skills that are found in managers to take care of other functions. It recognizes the fact that great leaders do not necessarily make phenomenal managers. For this reason, Facebook has settled on Sheryl Sandberg who happens to have a wide-range of skills in the area of management as its Chief Operating Officer. For the duration she has been with the company, she has been able to streamline the company’s functions, transforming from it from just being an admired site to a very profitable firm. She oversees the company’s business operations that include, but not limited to, business development, public policy, human resources, communication, sales, and marketing. Her inputs and those of the firm’s CEO have helped Facebook to be among the world’s most profitable companies that have clients the world over. Their combined skills continue to see the company record tremendous growth each year by outdoing its competitors.
Clearly, separating leadership and management is vital in improving organisational effectiveness. Whereas a manager’s function is to direct, a leader tends to innovate. Leaders are responsible for some of the fresh ideas that help organisations to stay ahead of their competition. Leaders use the knowledge that they have acquired in class creatively by innovating to suit some of the circumstances that they encounter. Managers seem to be more concerned with maintaining order in the organisation. Managers use the authority that comes with their positions to run things in line with the organisation’s goals and objectives. Leaders are inspirational in nature. They influence other people to act in a certain way as opposed to managers who tend to give orders on the activities that they expect their teams to carry out. Leaders are more willing to recognize failure, share their views with their teams, and/or seek their opinions on the way forward. They are also courageous enough to stand up to a higher authority in an organisation and recommend certain changes that they feel are necessary. On their part, managers depict excellent supervisory skills that are important in getting things done in an organisation.
Facebook Company considered the variation in leadership and management roles in its structure by choosing to hire Sheryl Sandberg who has a strong management background while maintaining Mark Zuckerburg as the CEO. Hence, it is paramount to separate management and leadership for greater organisational effectiveness.