Leadership vs. management

In 1977 a debate rose from a newly released article by Harvard Business School professor Abraham Zaleznik, with the title “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?”. The article created discord in the business schools, and the study of leadership and management has not been the same since. Zaleznik argued that managers are all about taking a path of stability and control, while trying to resolve problems, which they might not know the significance of. He also argues that managers focus on how to decide, not what decision to make. Leaders on the other hand embraces chance, even if it comes with disorder and without structure. In 1990 John P. Kotter published the article “What Leaders Really Do” to address the article by Zaleznik and the arguments that he makes. Kotter argues that leadership is not something mystical or something only few people can do, and neither can it be claimed that leadership is anything more than management. Kotter though agrees with Zaleznik, that management is about control and stability while leadership is about embracing chaos, where Kotter puts it as “Management is about coping with complexity. Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change” [1]. When thinking of the leaders in our life many of us might think to ourselves that they must be born to be leaders, that it must be abilities they were genetically blessed with. As where, when thinking of managers, most of us probably has an idea that there is a possibility to learn how to become one. To separate the two terms many theories can be applied. Where some leadership theories will resemble management theories and others will have completely different aspect to them. This article will address some of these theories as well as the articles mentioned.

[1] John P. Kotter. 2001. www.hbr.org. [ONLINE] Available at: https://hbr.org/2001/12/what-leaders-really-do. [Accessed 15 February 2019].