Management and Leadership

Management and Leadership

Within the organizational structure of most businesses you will likely find management and leadership coexisting. Commonly, the words are often substituted for one another. However, each word has a distinctly different definition. A manager does not necessarily make a good manager. Management is defined as those individuals in an organization that have the authority and the responsibility to manage the organization through the control of production processes and ensuring that they operate efficiently and effectively. Leadership is defined as the skills and ability to set future goals in accordance with the organizational goals and to communicate those goals to other employees in such a way that they voluntarily and harmoniously work together to accomplish those goals for the benefit of the organization. In this paper, I will differentiate between management and leadership.

Any organization needs to be managed, even a one-person company has to be managed. A manager has four key responsibilities: 1) planning, 2) organizing, 3) leading, and 4) controlling. Management can also be defined as the function that determines how the organization?s human, financial, physical, informational, and technical resources are arranged and coordinated to perform tasks towards achievement of strategic goals.

Leadership implies that the manager has fundamental knowledge about critical processes. A leader is focused on ensuring the creation of strategies, systems, and methods for achieving excellence and building knowledge and capabilities. Leaders are focused more on creating an enthusiastic work environment for all of a company?s employees. In other words leadership is to help people do a better job through coaching, facilitating, and by creating environments that support the aim of the organization. Leadership is the ability of a manager to train employees, remove institutional roadblocks, and empower employees. (Stern and Kren, 2002).

The common thread in differentiating between management and leadership seems to be that management is more involved with monitoring the details of the daily operations and leadership is about invoking the changes necessary to continuously move towards an organization?s vision. I have also found that in all of the success stories read, the common points are that the leaders took a different approach into the...

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... successful. I attribute the main reason to the fact that they are in control of the reward along with the recognition.

In summary, management is about control through a series of control mechanisms and although leadership is one of the four principles of management, leadership is a combination of personal traits and skills that directly affects the opinions and attitudes of people, leading to changes in behavior. A person can be an effective manager but that does not necessarily make that person an effective leader. Leadership is about insight towards the future and helping individual employees and groups of employees to accept uncertainty, because they have confidence that the leader will provide solutions to any problems that may arise.

References

Stern, Kenneth and Kren, Lawrence (2004, December 9). Machine design.

Know and grow. Retrieved January 17, 2005, from University of Phoenix Online,

ProQuest Database Website: http://web22.epnet.com/externalframe. asp?tb=1&_ug=sid+553EA1C5%2D2133%2D4C4D%2D976B%2D01F560CA7714%40sessionmgr4+dbs+aph%2Cf5h%2Cbuh%2Cawh%2Cufh+cp+1+6C31&_us=hs+False+or+Date+ss+SO+sm+KS+sl+%2D1+dstb+KS+ri+KAAACBSC00041487+ED56&_uso=tg%5B0+%2D+db