Leading Managers

¶ … Leadership Management When thinking leadership, essential roles responsibilities a leader. Leadership Within professional organizations today, there has traditionally been a great degree of misunderstanding about the roles and responsibilities of managers and leaders. Similarly, there is a substantial amount of confusion between what is denoted and connoted by leadership and management.

However, a thorough review of some of the more salient articles on this subject today reveals that the essential distinction between these two terms is that leaders identify objectives and goals for an organization, while managers work (almost explicitly) to fulfill those goals. There appears to be an applied hierarchy between these positions and their roles and responsibilities which is not necessarily true.

Although managers are working to complete the directives of leaders, there are actually distinct skills and characteristics between these two positions which do not necessarily imply that one is better than the other -- despite the fact that many consider leadership roles synonymous with success (Blunt, 2008). One of the most pressing similarities between the roles of both leaders and managers is that they are both responsible for the success of an organization.

The key distinction is that leaders are responsible for this success at the macro or overall comprehensive level, while managers shoulder this responsibility at the micro level. This distinction is also evident in another crucial distinction between leaders and managers -- the specific means of asserting their responsibility at the macro and micro levels, respectively. As Plachy (2009) indicates, "Stating a vision and creating excitement is what a leader does, but directing actions to accomplish the vision crosses the line into a manager's job" (p. 53).

What is implicit in the preceding quotation is another key distinction that is in accordance with the fact that leaders and managers deal with their responsibilities at the micro and macro levels, respectively. Leaders are responsible for motivating and actuating people and doing so from a perspective that is generally inclusive of most (if not all) people within an organization. Managers, on the other hand, are less responsible for people and more charged with procuring the specific goals of the organization.

Thus, the various roles that each of the individuals who are in these two very different positions must fulfill are far from the same. Managers are more concerned with the bottom line and are essentially responsible for galvanizing the people who work in their respective departments as it relates to accomplishing the ends of those departments. Leaders, however, have more of a personal or even an emotive connection with the people that comprise an organization.

This role is expanded when they choose to employ transformational leadership, of course -- the opposite is transactional or a rewards and punishment type of leadership (Ivey and Kline, 2010, p. 247). Still, virtually all leaders are charged with getting their followers to believe in them and in the vision that they have for a specific organization. Managers, then, may encounter various points in times in which they are not oliked by the various people that they are managing.

This occurrence will take place because managers are primarily concerned with doing the best thing for the organization.