The Difference Between Leader and Manager

The difference between leader and
manager
The traditional view of management, back in 1977 when Abraham Zaleznik wrote this
article, centered on organizational structure and processes. Managerial development at the
time focused exclusively on building competence, control, and the appropriate balance of
power. That view, Zaleznik argued, omitted the essential leadership elements of
inspiration, vision, and human passion—which drive corporate success.
The difference between managers and leaders, he wrote, lies in the conceptions they hold,
deep in their psyches, of chaos and order. Managers embrace process, seek stability and
control, and instinctively try to resolve problems quickly—sometimes before they fully
understand a problem’s significance. Leaders, in contrast, tolerate chaos and lack of
structure and are willing to delay closure in order to understand the issues more fully. In
this way, Zaleznik argued, business leaders have much more in common with artists,
scientists, and other creative thinkers than they do with managers. Organizations need both
managers and leaders to succeed, but developing both requires a reduced focus on logic and
strategic exercises in favor of an environment where creativity and imagination are
permitted to flourish.
What is the ideal way to develop leadership? Every society provides its own answer to this
question, and each, in groping for answers, defines its deepest concerns about the purposes,
distributions, and uses of power. Business has contributed its answer to the leadership
question by evolving a new breed called the manager. Simultaneously, business has
established a new power ethic that favors collective over individual leadership, the cult of
the group over that of personality. While ensuring the competence, control, and the balance
of power among groups with the potential for rivalry, managerial leadership unfortunately
does not necessarily ensure imagination, creativity, or ethical behavior in guiding the
destinies of corporate enterprises.
Leadership inevitably requires using power to influence the thoughts and actions of other
people. Power in the hands of an individual entails human risks: first, the risk of equating
power with the ability to get immediate results; second, the risk of ignoring the many
different ways people can legitimately accumulate power; and third, the risk of losing self-
control in the desire for power. The need to hedge these risks accounts in part for the
development of collective leadership and the managerial ethic. Consequently, an inherent
conservatism dominates the culture of large organizations. In The Second American
Revolution, John D. Rockefeller III describes the conservatism of organizations:
“An organization is a system, with a logic of its own, and all the weight of tradition and
inertia. The deck is stacked in favor of the tried and proven way of doing things and against
the taking of risks and striking out in new directions.”1
Out of this conservatism and inertia, organizations provide succession to power through the
development of managers rather than individual leaders. Ironically, this ethic fosters a
bureaucratic culture in business, supposedly the last bastion protecting us from the
encroachments and controls of bureaucracy in government and education.
Manager vs. Leader Personality

A managerial culture emphasizes rationality and control. Whether his or her energies are
directed toward goals, resources, organization structures, or people, a manager is a problem
solver. The manager asks: “What problems have to be solved, and what are the best ways
to achieve results so that people will continue to contribute to this organization?” From this
perspective, leadership is simply a practical effort to direct affairs; and to fulfill his or her
task, a manager requires that many people operate efficiently at different levels of status
and responsibility. It takes neither genius nor heroism to be a manager, but rather
persistence, tough-mindedness, hard work, intelligence, analytical ability, and perhaps most
important, tolerance and goodwill.
Another conception of leadership, however, attaches almost mystical beliefs to what a

leader is and assumes that only great people are worthy of the drama of power and politics.
Here leadership is a psychodrama in which a brilliant, lonely person must gain control of
himself or herself as a precondition for controlling others. Such an expectation of
leadership contrasts sharply with the mundane, practical, and yet important conception that
leadership is really managing work that other people do.
Three questions come to mind. Is this leadership mystique merely a holdover from our
childhood—from a sense of dependency and a longing for good and heroic parents? Or is it
true that no matter how competent managers are, their leadership stagnates because of their
limitations in visualizing purposes and generating value in work? Driven by narrow
purposes, without an imaginative capacity and the ability to communicate, do managers
then perpetuate group conflicts instead of reforming them into broader desires and goals?
If indeed problems demand greatness, then judging by past performance, the selection and
development of leaders leave a great deal to chance. There are no known ways to train
“great” leaders. Further, beyond what we leave to chance, there is a deeper issue in the
relationship between the need for competent managers and the longing for great leaders.
What it takes to ensure a supply of people who will assume practical responsibility may
inhibit the development of great leaders. On the other hand, the presence of great leaders
may undermine the development of managers who typically become very anxious in the
relative disorder that leaders seem to generate.
It is easy enough to dismiss the dilemma of training managers, though we may need new
leaders or leaders at the expense of managers, by saying that the need is for people who can
be both. But just as a managerial culture differs from the entrepreneurial culture that
develops when leaders appear in organizations, managers and leaders are very different
kinds of people. They differ in motivation, personal history, and in how they think and act.
Development of Leadership
Every person’s development begins with family. Each person experiences the traumas
associated with separating from his or her parents, as well as the pain that follows such a
wrench. In the same vein, all individuals face the difficulties of achieving self-regulation and self-
control. But for some, perhaps a majority, the fortunes of childhood provide adequate
gratifications and sufficient opportunities to find substitutes for rewards no longer available.
Such individuals, the “once-borns,” make moderate identifications with parents and find a
harmony between what they expect and what they are able to realize from life.
But suppose the pains of separation are amplified by a combination of parental demands and
individual needs to the degree that a sense of isolation, of being special, or of wariness disrupts
the bonds that attach children to parents and other authority figures? Given a special aptitude
under such conditions, the person becomes deeply involved in his or her inner world at the
expense of interest in the outer world. For such a person, self-esteem no longer depends solely
on positive attachments and real rewards. A form of self-reliance takes hold along with
expectations of performance and achievement, and perhaps even the desire to do great works.
Such self-perceptions can come to nothing if the individual’s talents are negligible. Even with
strong talents, there are no guarantees that achievement will follow, let alone that the end
result will be for good rather than evil. Other factors enter into development as well. For one,
leaders are like artists and other gifted people who often struggle with neuroses; their ability to
function varies considerably even over the short run, and some potential leaders lose the
struggle altogether. Also, beyond early childhood, the development patterns that affect
managers and leaders involve the selective influence of particular people. Managerial
personalities form moderate and widely distributed attachments. Leaders, on the other hand,
establish, and also break off, intensive one-to-one relationships.
By : mohammad najjar
s.num: 11924200

The Difference Between Leader and Manager

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Difference Between Leader and Manager

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Difference Between Leader and Manager

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The difference between leader and

Manager vs. Leader Personality

Another conception of leadership, however, attaches almost mystical beliefs to what a

You might also like