A Leader and a Manager, Which Is the Best to Be If They Are Different?

Who is a manager and who is a leader? Are they the same, or are they different?  If different, is one preferred? Which is the more effective amongst both? What qualities and traits different them?  Is it possible to be a leader and not a manager and vice-versa?  These are the rhetoric questions that have pervaded the minds of management experts, scholars and researchers over time on the subject of the comparison of leadership and management.

Leadership’s first concern is with people: Putting people in the best frame of mind to enable them perform their assigned tasks achieving maximum results even in the most difficult circumstances. Whereas, management’s first concern is with things, material resources, the organization, the system, the processes, the most effective management and utilization of resources to obtain maximum results.

Leadership is not determined by title, status, position, age, duration, academic or professional qualifications, but one can hardly be a manager without any of these. While leadership is concerned about the vision of the organization, society, community or family, the core concern of management is with the mission or the how, the process of achieving the vision.

Whereas the bottom line of the leader is in ‘what’ and ‘where’, that of the manager is in ‘how’.   The leader is interested in who does what and what result is obtained; the manager is more interested in how it is done – the processes.  To that extent, the manager can be described as systems-driven, process-driven, target-driven, task-driven, job-driven and result-driven.  Whereas the leader is nothing else but is people-driven.  The leader’s main interest is in what was done while the manager’s interest is in how it was done.

The leader’s best compliment is the one s/he receives from his/her subordinates while that of the manager is the one s/he receives from his/her superiors.  While the leader concentrates on the motivation, development and empowerment of his/her subordinates and followers to be able to achieve the targets set for them ,  the manager is rather motivated by the demands and pressure from his/her superiors which s/he cascades down irrespective of the feelings and the state of the followers.  So a manager would rather meet his/her target at the cost of his/her subordinates’ health and happiness as long as s/he can please his/her employers.  The leader, like John Maxwell would say, rather ‘touches the heart before s/he asks for the hand’ of his/her subordinates. But the manager would rather demand for the hand before s/he ever touches the heart. 

From the above comparison, it would appear as if the leader is soft-hearted, humane, easy-going people-person and therefore to be preferred to the tough talking, no-nonsense, task-driven manager.  The irony however is that neither approach is better in the most effective management and leadership of organizations and institutions.  The extreme of either, losses out in the end.  Either the authority of the ‘soft-hearted’ ‘leader’ is taking for granted and undermined by the subordinates, or the hot-headed task-driven manager losses his subordinates’ respect and genuine followership.  The challenge that must be identified in the circumstance therefore, would be how to effectively combine and apply either, where most suitable.