Leadership & Strategic Management


Difference between a Leader & a Manager

At a glance a leader & a manager would be taken as one, similar to each other, if the differentiation isn’t done appropriately. Yet there are differences between the two. An effective Leader is a person who has the right direction, self-motivation and the ability to drive his/her followers to a common goal collectively. Whereas a Manager is a person who too has a goal yet follows a planned set of rules to achieve it, and nothing beyond or innovative comes in between to reach it.
A company cannot run with Management alone & or Leadership alone, according to John .P. Kotter (1990) “companies should remember that strong leadership with weak management is no better, and is sometimes actually worse, than the reverse. The real challenge is to combine strong leadership and strong management and use each to balance the other”.

The table below depicts some differences between a manager & a leader





If you take a day to day situation, there is a leader or a manager within everyone. Through the course of time people work on their hidden qualities, intentionally or unintentionally, to bring out the more dominating leader or manager quality in them.

As John. P. Kotter has quoted, it is always necessary to have the right mix of leadership and management qualities to operate a company efficiently.

Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Mahathma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln are still considered great leaders. These names still echoes in one’s mind up to date, when asked to name a great leader. Imagine the magnitude of their influential ability to be still in the minds of people even after decades of their demise. In contrast, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Richard Branson are leaders of modern day. All these leaders were and are powerful people of the world, with each having thousands of followers, as previously known, maybe it had something to do with the charisma these leaders carried with them enabled them to become leaders and to have this many followers.
Reference:
Kotter, J.P. (2001). What Leaders Really Do. 

Comments

  1. UnknownAugust 24, 2018 at 2:37 AM

    Blv this article is not related to our HR sessions. Pls revisit and adv.

    ReplyDelete
  2. nilukaAugust 27, 2018 at 7:59 AM

    HI. Ok

    Thus need more reading and content in the work. let's improve going forward.

    ReplyDelete

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