Management versus leadership qualities

Abstract

This article will focus on differentiating what makes a leader and a manager, and how these qualities might differ when looking at the very top of an organisation compared to lower levels, as suggested by Peter Farey . It is known that managers tend to seek control of the situation, avoid instability and resolve issues in the quickest manner possible. On the other hand, leaders are more inclined to allow chaos and uncertain situations in favour of getting a better understanding of the problem and gain helpful insights. Management focuses on planning and building, whether as leadership strives to give direction and inspiring . But can these two profiles be fulfilled by the same individual , and can we see different answers to that question when looking at a high ranking managers compared to mid-to-low level employees? These cases among others will be explored in the following page.

Managers and leaders: Are They Different?

This section will talk about Abraham Zaleznik's award winning article for the Harvard Business Review named Managers and leaders: Are They Different?. The article is structured into different topics in which the author shows the different traits that characterize each of the roles for said topic. These will be discussed separately in order to gain view on speific diferences that might suit one or other role in a given situation.

Leadership inevitably requires using power to influence the thoughts and actions of other people.

Manager vs. Leader Personality

Zaleznik describes managers and leaders as two very different roles, almost opposing in personality. These characters have very different views on most of the decision-making in a company, which makes their personalities clashing at times.

Management is often associated with rationality. The main goal for a good manager is to get thigs done, and to do so in the least disturbing way for its subordinates. A problem solver by nature, he or she will try to get the team working and operating efficiently in order to work towards a common goal.

On the other hand, leaders have more of a chaotic way of working. It is in instability that they find better progress, and often work in ways that would make a manager anxious. Commonly viewed as brilliant and isolated persons, they are seen as people who have had experiences in their upbringing that have made them thrive in conflicting environments.

The author also comments on the fact that managers have traits that can be trained, but this does not apply to leaders. As there are no ways to train leaders, it is left to chance that one might appear where needed. Then again, if a leader is present, his ways of working might undermine the development of managers who will not thrive under the leader's conditions and viceversa. Zaleznik answers to this dillema by saying that the actual need is for people who can act as both roles. But this in itself is a contradiction, as the personal values, history and way of percieving the world are way too distant.

Attitudes Toward Goals

The way that goals are viewed differs greatly depending on your values and background, this can clearly be seen in the way that Zaleznik portraits them.

It is a natural tendency for a manager to seek rationality and control. His primary focus is that of getting things done. There is no time for trying to achieve desires, as necessities have the primary focus on tasks to be finished. Zaleznik reinforces his point on this by giving an example of an attitude toward goals that defines a manager. Frederic G. Donner, CEO of General Motors (1958-1967) said that a company must be able to get the right product in the right place at the right moment in the correct quantity, and to do this it must be able to create the product that the customer needs, not the one that it wants to produce.

This stance is very different to what a leader would want to do. They would want to push their idea into the market, even though the customer doesn't know it has a need for it. This can be seen throughout history in cases such as Polaroid, bringing a camera that would take the snapshot and develop the image almost instantly. This is for sure something that the public did not ask for or know about, but a development of technology.

Both of these examples show that leaders search for opportunities in an active manner while bringing up emotions, wanting people to change their expectations, whether as managers prefer to be more reactive.

Conceptions of Work

On this topic, Zaleznik shows through an example that a manager will always tend to keep his subordinates as happy as possible with the possibilities given. He or she must convert an adverse situation into a win-win scenario. This often means that the employees will have their choices limited in order to maintain the opposing views balanced. This is completely opposite to how a leader would manage the situation. While facing an adverse situation, they would try to open the issue to new options. Innovation by getting people excited and get them to believe in a project.

It could be said that managers want to put out the small fires as quickly as possible, whether as leaders would use the fire to their advantage, even though there might be a risk involved. Risk often drives leaders, it makes manager anxious instead by kicking their survival instincts in. This is why leaders will usually feel bored by mundane tasks, when managers feel the most comfortable in them.

Relations with Others

According to Zaleznik, managers avoid being alone. Being in a solitary activity makes them anxious, and reinforces his point by talking about some studies he directed. An image of a lonely boy with a violin would be shown to both a manager and a leader, and they were asked to describe what was happening. The former would talk about what it meant to the boy's family and their relationship, wheter as the latter would talk about the boy's lonely struggles to become better and master his skills.

Throught this experience, the author makes a point in saying that managers always tend to seek company, draw them into their activity and sometimes have it hard to relate to others. On the other hand, he says that leaders have a bigger capacity to empatize with relatable characters, using more emotionally provoking words, such as "intense" or "deeply".

The way that these roles communicate with their peers is vastly different. A manager will always tend to communicate with signals. These are much more ambiguous that messages, and thus can be interpreted in various ways. This is such because if a co-worker did not like the signal that the manager gave him, he can try to re-interpret it in order to avoid conflict. The problem with this is that managers are then often described as insincere by their peers, because of this common practice. But as Zaleznik says: "Managers strive to convert win-lose into win-win situations as part of the process of reconciling differences among people and maintaining balances of power". They will also use time to their advantage, as sometimes with time passing situations might have new compromises into play. This means that clear win-lose situations might end up with both parties happy. This also makes managers come up sometimes as dishonest and even manipulative. On the contrary, leaders will tend to communicate with clear messages, not open to any other interpretation. This is why they are viewed as more sincere than managers, even though these messages sometimes bring conflict into the table, and also why they are commonly described with very intense adjectives, whether that be from love or hate.