Today, I received an email from someone who was upset saying “all you need to

run an organization effectively is management and not leadership.” Well, this

may work if your team is comprised of robots and if you don’t care about leaving
a legacy. As soon as you hand in your resignation or retirement letter and step
outside those organization doors, you will be forgotten.

Management is the set of processes that keep an organization functioning.

Leadership on the other hand requires the ability to influence a group toward the
achievement of goals. Management focuses on the bottom line. A leader is
interested in followers—the people who will deliver the process that leads to the
bottom line.

Managers excel in figuring out the best way to control their team to complete
tasks. Leaders inspire people to do the tasks. Managers rely on control; leaders
rely on trust. Leaders command respect. Managers demand it. You have to be
able to win the hearts and minds of your employees if you want buy-in and
commitment. Management alone will cause people to come in 8:00am and leave
at 4:00pm on the dot.

There are days when I really need my team to give the extra effort whether that
meant coming in a little earlier or working late and they always supported me.
What I was asking is outside of their job description and yet they willingly
complied. This takes leadership. Leadership is a team game, and true leaders
make great team players because of their ability to understand and connect with
people around them.

Being a manager is a job. Managers implement the practices of the organization.

Being a leader is a role. Leaders guide and inspire. Their fulfilment comes in
bringing about positive change. A good leader puts the interest of their followers
before their own and measure success by whether their followers are better off.

Leaders help organizations and people to grow, while a manager’s greatest

accomplishment comes from making work processes more effective. Leadership
breeds loyalty, dedication, and accountability. Leaders inspire, motivate, and
influence their teams and assist them in reaching their goals and achieving their
highest possible performance.
 “Leadership is an art of accomplishing more than the science of management
says is possible.” ~Colin Powell

Leaders build people through training, coaching, mentoring, and rewarding. They
recognize that everyone is motivated differently. Managers, on the other hand,
believe people will be motivated if you pay them enough. Leaders understand
that pay is a satisfier but not the only motivator.

In this time of economic uncertainty, technological advancement coupled with

the increasingly complex and volatile business environment, the need to
demonstrate BOTH leadership and management in perfect situational correlations
has never been more critical for success.

So which is more important? Both are important but naturally, leadership is

ahead of management. A well-balanced organization has leadership at its base.

In building our businesses, we need to harness our passion and vision with
disciplined processes. For an organization to achieve strong results, both
leadership and management need to be present. With good management and
poor leadership the team will lack the motivation to pursue goals. Additionally,
without efficient management skills the direction set by a leader risks being
unsustainable.

How an organization strikes balance between management and leadership

depends on the type of business, the people, and the environment in which it
operates.