Leadership vs Management

Leadership is about dealing with change, whereas Management, by contrast, is about coping with complexity. As an example; if you want to get people moving in the same direction, stop trying to organize them, and start to align them instead.

Just because leadership is different from management, doesn't mean it's necessarily better or a replacement for it. Leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems; each has its function, and both are necessary for success.

Companies should remember that strong leadership with weak management is no better, and is sometimes actually worse than the reverse. The real challenge is to combine strong leadership and active management and use each to balance the other.

Management ensures plan accomplishment by controlling and problem-solving, and monitoring results versus the plan using reports, meetings, and other tools, and then planning and organizing to solve the problems. For leadership, achieving a vision requires motivating and inspiring, keeping people moving in the right direction, despite significant obstacles to change, by appealing to basic but often untapped human needs, values, and emotions.

Inspired by: Harvard Business Review - What Leaders Really Do, by John P. Kotter