Successful Leadership vs Management Styles in 15 Easy Steps
Successful Leadership vs Management Styles in 15 Easy Steps
“The main difference between leaders and managers is that leaders have people who follow them while managers have people who work for them”, writes go2HR.com. Successful business owners are both a strong leader and manager who get their team on board to follow them towards achieving their vision of success. Leadership is about getting people to understand and believe in your vision and to work with you to achieve your goals. While managing is more about administering and making sure the day-to-day things are happening as they should.
As Sir William Slim, puts it; “The leader and those who follow represent one of the oldest, most natural and most effective human relationships. The manager and those who follow are a later product with neither so romantic or inspiring history. Leadership is the spirit, compounded by personality and vision – its practice is an art. Management is of the mind, more a matter of accurate calculation, statistics, methods, time tables, and routine – its practice is a science.”
How to be an outstanding manager
John Harvey-Jones, former Chief Executive and Chairman of ICI, writes: “Good managers realize that the difference between them and others in the business lies in the transition they have made from completing jobs and tasks themselves to getting things done through others. Whatever the manager achieves has a multiplier effect. If he or she gets it right, others will get it right. If he or she screws it up, others will screw it up.
I find myself intolerant of management books that seeks to prescribe exactly how it should be done. My own experience shows that there are many different ways of achieving one’s aims and many different ways of leading an industrial company. I have worked with leaders whose style is so totally different to my own that I have found it incomprehensible that they achieve results, but nevertheless they do.
Each one of us has to develop our own style, and our own approach, using such skills and personal qualities as we have inherited…What each of us does over a long period of trial and error is to acquire a set of tools with which we are comfortable and which we can apply in different ways to the myriad problems which we need to solve.”
Leadership vs Management Styles
- Leadership is an art – management is a science
- Leaders lead people – managers manage things
- Leaders operate in the future – managers deal in the present
- Leaders are change agents – managers deal with the status-quo
- Leaders empower – managers control
- Leaders strive for effectiveness – managers aim for efficiency
- Leaders inspire – managers plan
- Leaders listen – managers talk
- Leaders make people feel strong – managers direct people
- Leaders stretch people – managers maintain people
- Leaders excite people – managers monitor people
- Leaders defy order – managers seek order
- Leaders make time – managers are always busy
- Leaders experiment – managers create routines
- Leaders create businesses – managers run them
Are you both a leader and a manager; what would your staff say if you were to ask them? Send us your feedback!
