MANAGE OR LEAD?

Businesses need to find a balance

BY Jayashantha Jayawardhana

Peter Drucker summed it up beautifully when he said: “Management is doing things right, leadership is doing the right things.” This quote addresses the perennial debate on management compared to leadership.

Simply stated, a leader is a visionary who sees the big picture through what appears to be inchoate ideas. Leaders can motivate their people into action to the fulfilment of their vision. This takes imagination, confidence, integrity, power and charisma.

A manager’s mandate is to fulfil the leader’s vision with the right controls in place. Instead of envisioning, he or she has to exercise rationality and caution, and follow well-defined processes.

Let’s explore the ‘management vs leadership’ debate a little further so you know why leaders and managers should work together, to propel their organisations to success and reinforce each other’s actions to achieve greater results.

In an article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), Abraham Zaleznik wrote: “What’s the ideal way to develop leadership? Every society provides its own answer to this question and each, in groping for answers, defines its deepest concerns about the purposes, distributions and uses of power.”


“Business has contributed its answer to the leadership question by evolving a new breed called the manager. Simultaneously, business has established a new power ethic that favours collective over individual leadership, the cult of the group over that of personality,” he added.

Zaleznik also noted that “while ensuring competence, control and the balance of power among groups with the potential for rivalry, managerial leadership unfortunately doesn’t necessarily ensure imagination, creativity or ethical behaviour in guiding the destinies of corporate enterprises.”

Despite the passage of more than four decades, his argument still rings true in the context of contemporary organisations.

Typically, a manager is a problem solver. He or she is always looking for optimal ways to solve a particular problem – whether it’s about the goals, resources, organisation structure or people – and assumes practical responsibility for this process.

When it comes to organisational goals, managers tend to take a more impersonal approach. For them, managerial goals arise out of organisational necessities rather than passion or desire. But for leaders, it’s the opposite; they’re active as opposed to reactive and shaping ideas instead of responding to them. So leaders have an active and personal attitude towards reaching goals.

Leaders don’t seek to play it safe. Not that they take wild bets; but they’re often temperamentally disposed to seeking risk and danger – this is particularly so when the opportunity and rewards appear to be promising.

Observing the stark contrast, Zaleznik wrote: “For those who become managers, a survival instinct dominates the need for risk; and with that instinct comes an ability to tolerate mundane, practical work. Leaders sometimes react to mundane work as to an affliction.”

It’s not uncommon to see the survival instinct egging on some managers in the wrong direction and inflicting harm on their organisations.

Even highly competent managers often become insecure and suspicious of talented people in their charge, particularly when their juniors seem to outshine them. So they seek to promote less smart people at the expense of the more promising candidates.

In contrast, when leaders spot talent, they are keen to foster it in the best interests of their organisation. Managers may do the same but only as long as they don’t feel threatened.

It should also be noted that leadership isn’t essentially a function of designation. A person could be the chairman of the board but still think like a manager while an individual at the bottom of this same organisation could have leadership potential.

Nevertheless, even if most of the scholarly writings on organisations extol the virtues of leadership and condemn the evils of management, it’s ill-advised to assume that leaders are inherently better than managers.

It’s better to regard leadership and management as two roles that entail two distinct but equally important skill sets. And if you want to be a competent senior executive, it pays to develop both skills.

Viewed in this light, a combination of visionary leaders who always factor organisational realities into their vision, and competent managers who don’t allow processes, procedures and prejudices to block the growth and prosperity of the enterprise, makes the most effective recipe for enduring organisational success.

These insights may help you understand whether your organisation, strategic business unit, division or department is under-led and over-managed or vice versa, identify how to address it, and pursue better organisational performance and growth.