I have come to dislike the distinction that is commonly made between leaders and managers for two reasons – firstly, everyone goes off imagining they are born to be a leader and miss out on the management, and secondly the personal experience of most people I asked has been that we are both – in some areas a leader, in others a manager, and this may even be so concurrently or shift back and forth with time. In addition, the various traits of leadership/management (of which there are many examples, like this graphic) can be exercised individually, in a mix, and also to various levels of capability.
Simply put: I am the manager of my department for my boss, but I am the leader of my department for my direct reports. I manage my own family finances, and also lead the direction in which it develops. I was a member and then a captain of a badminton team, and then a member again. I was a leader in a specific technical area in railways before changing industry and taking my current job, and – no surprise here – I am no longer required to show leadership in that area.
The theory is quite simple too – leader says what is to be done and provides the resources so manager can execute. However, the relationship is a symbiosis, not a rivalry or a master-servant relationship. The position of manager is unjustly decried, even in the graphic mentioned already we find references to “good” manager but also to a “great” leader – as though a leader were all you needed, or the manager were a sort of interchangeable accessory. Just accept this advice – if anyone wants to be a leader, let that person first experience management, and then assemble capable managers to execute the actions. Let’s hear it for the equally “great” managers who actually made those “great” things happen, and also understand that since we are all concurrently “leaders” and “managers” in various ways, there is not so much difference and only a low barrier between the two.
