BUSINESS CONTINUITY
CONTRASTING GOALS
Managers vs leaders in perspective
BY Jayashantha Jayawardhana
Management guru Peter Drucker once said that “management is doing things right while leadership is doing the right thing.” Although both managers and leaders are found in organisations, they are equally essential for the successful performance and continuity of a business enterprise.
And though they’re inherently different breeds, the two groups are supposed to collaborate with each other as they play their roles.
So how do managers and leaders differ from each other?
Managers are primarily concerned with ensuring competence, control and balance of power among groups with the potential for rivalry. In stark contrast, leaders believe in inspiration, vision, human passion and imagination, to shape and guide the destiny of corporate enterprises.
Therefore, their very difference is precisely why they are both essential for organisational success.
Writing in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), the late Abraham Zaleznik observed that “leadership inevitably requires using power to influence the thoughts and actions of other people.”
He continued: “Power in the hands of an individual entails human risks – first, the risk of equating power with the ability to get immediate results; second, the risk of ignoring the many different ways people can legitimately accumulate power; and third, the risk of losing self-control in the desire for power.”
So management evolved out of the organisational necessity to hedge these potential risks. They are too important to ignore because we have seen how power in the wrong hands – be it in business, politics and other spheres of society – can destroy organisations, nations and communities.
Notably, the wrong hands don’t necessarily have to be evil; being stupid or naive is sufficient to wreak havoc, as we know!
But the corporate obsession with management at the expense of leadership consequently gives rise to conservatism in organisational culture. In his book titled ‘The Second American Revolution,’ John D. Rockefeller III describes the conservatism of organisations.
“An organisation is a system with a logic of its own, and all the weight of tradition and inertia. The deck is stacked in favour of the tried and proven way of doing things, and against the taking of risks and striking out in new directions,” he explains.
Meanwhile, Zaleznik noted that out of conservatism and inertia, organisations provide succession to power through the development of managers rather than individual leaders.
Since such conservatism stifles innovation and leads to stagnation over time, a progressive organisation must safeguard itself against this.
On the other hand, a progressive enterprise can’t afford to be pursuing dicey grandiose visions all the time at the expense of control and order. So a healthy balance must be struck between training managers and developing leaders.
Zaleznik spelled out the ensuing corporate dilemma: “What it takes to ensure a supply of people who will assume practical responsibility may inhibit the development of great leaders. On the other hand, the presence of great leaders may undermine the development of managers who typically become very anxious in the relative disorder that leaders seem to generate.”
Granted, that does sound like a mutually exclusive proposition. And that’s because there’s no single means to meet both ends.
Instead, you must place equal emphasis on training managers and developing leaders, and adopt two different approaches – because managers and leaders differ in motivation, personal history, and how they think and act.
Managers and leaders also differ widely when it comes to their attitude towards goals. The former tends to have an impersonal if not passive attitude towards goals. Managerial goals spring from necessities rather than desire or passion.
In comparison, leaders are typically active rather than reactive and shape ideas instead of responding to them. They adopt a personal and dynamic attitude towards goals. The influence that a leader exerts in shifting moods, evoking images and expectations, and inculcating specific desires and objectives sets the course for a business.
When it comes to work, managers tend to view it as an enabling process involving a combination of people and ideas that interact to establish strategies and make decisions. They plan work within a clear operational scope and stick to it.
Where managers seek to limit choices, leaders conceive novel approaches to longstanding problems and are open to new options.
Managers’ relations with their immediate subordinates and other people are typically driven by the needs of the workplace. As they strive to meet operational targets, managers tend to become impersonal and lack empathy.
Essentially, their very differences explain why we can’t do without either.
