To Be a Great Leader One Must Be a Great Manager First - Essay Example

?To be a great leader one must be a great manager first: The importance of good and stable management is unquestionable and one that can never be denied in any kind of situation or organizational emergency. Good managers can lead the rest of people working for the same organization in a very mature and commendable manner highly indicative of professionalism while facing a small number of obstacles. It is virtually impossible to be a good leader without being a concerned, smart, highly aware, and responsible manager first. Only commanding people to perform several different jobs without getting sufficiently involved with them implies that an employer is chiefly concerned about authoritarian rulership. Even if a person objects to authoritarian leadership and feels compelled to commit him/herself to just be a good leader, he/she still can face a number of hurdles while running his/her organization if all the managerial knowledge and skills are not smartly engineered first. Leading and management are seen as complementary and related by Andersen (2012). Though leadership and management are distinct, they still should be balanced. The theme of this essay is that one cannot become a great leader without becoming a great manager first who has shrewd and insightful skills about handling people and keeping them sane even amidst the worst of circumstances possible. The essay will discuss how learning to maintain a sound reputation as a manager could be important for a leader and why a leader less concerned about developing smart managerial strategies and good relations with employees can never make it to the top. Bartridge (2007) emphasizes that leaders should practice the 5 L’s which are about looking, listening, learning, leading, and laughing with their team. Such traits not only aspire people to perform well but also build up their connections with staff. The riveting combination of responsible leadership and management actually proves to be the magic recipe for any successful organization. Many people are heard calling themselves the leaders but seldom among them care enough to be good managers also. The old manager vs. leader argument implies that “some great managers struggle with change and fail to be great leaders, while a great leader might fail to create a sense of stability in an organization and not measure up as a manager” (Blagg and Young, 2001) which is why both leadership and management should overlap. The key element capable of carrying an anonymous leader all they way up to greatness and worldwide fame is good management and big globally successful companies like Apple Inc. and Starbucks fully acknowledge this fact. Both leadership and management, though different in certain aspects, should be carefully balanced with each other as “both have essential roles in the function and effectiveness of organizations” (DeGrosky, 2012). Hard times strike every organization and every business around the world from time to time but the power lies in sharp managerial skills which can save the ratings of a business in the market from plummeting down even when finances are not so handsome. “An individual can be a great leader, a great manager, or both, but each area requires the mastery of slightly different skills and competencies” (Ricketts, 2009). People can be managed and carried safely through hard times if the leaders care enough to win their confidence by carefully balancing management and leadership. The Balancing Act as explained by Valenzuela (2010) implies that leadership and management should be balanced to cure the disease in which organizations tend to be either overmanaged or underled. Leaders should know how to listen and communicate as this is implied by good management. “Leaders need to be masterful listeners; they need to be able to receive as well as send” (Blagg and Young, 2001). Without support of positive style management, leadership alone can never save a company from sinking in the depths of anonymity and failure. In fact without good management, there is no leadership in the first place. What remains after good management is gone is a company set ablaze by pandemonium, conflicts, confusions, instability, tarnished reputation, and estranged employer-employee relations. Ricketts (2009) claims that all the skills like technical skill, human skill, and conceptual skill necessary for effective management are also useful for good leadership. Learning the ways to become a good manager before advancing on to becoming a good leader is important because managers can teach the workforce all the essentials for becoming the best by granting them development opportunities. They develop and implement “corporate responsibility into core business strategies” (csr.global, 2008). They can also teach their employees about how they can extract maximum advantage possible out of limited resources. Good management is about teaching employees the worth of limited resources and how they can help expand them. If the right skills are chosen for the right kinds of jobs and people selected for those jobs are later on kept highly motivated by managers, a company otherwise ravenous for success can be kept satiated. “The competitive and global nature of today's business environment forces organizations to make the most of their assets” (Bartridge, 2007) and employees should be seen as an asset. It is understandably impossible to lead people without knowing how to manage them because a chaos awaits even the most successful and reputable companies of all times time and again and if the leaders fail to realize the importance of good management during such tough times, a company can totally lose its track sometimes as this is the age of fierce global competitiveness which leaves little room for mistakes. While leading is more about yourself and who you are, management is more of a talent or a craft like cooking or any other tough skill demanding copious amounts of hard work (Andersen, 2012). A leader should be a visionary as an excellent visionary can majorly help “a good manager build a self driven team” (Anil, 2012). Cherishing a desire to become a leader by acquiring a master’s control over all the essential managerial skills means that a person is conscious enough to work on the employees’ interests also in addition to setting mutual organizational goals. It is stressed by Abraham (cited in Wiradji, 2012) also that a company should pay attention to increasing the welfare of the employees as recognizing them alone is not enough. Fostering confidence in workers is very important, something which responsible managers should especially be good at if they aim to become the best leaders themselves one day. It is claimed by Abraham that “fostering team confidence spurs corporate growth” (cited in Wiradji, 2012). Managers should have a dynamic personality which they should keep developing and they should be the ones in an organization to whom the employees run upon encountering any confusion or difficulty. They should not develop their personalities so that others start running away from them. The circle of leading and the circle of management which implies how leaders operate should overlap with each other (Andersen, 2012). The ability to lead people through good and bad times with smart professionalism and awake conscience is so important that many consider it to be one among the three imperatives for becoming a great leader. As emphasized by Hill and Lineback (2012), managing your team forms the first most imperative and is mainly about selecting the best skilled workers from a giant pool of talent and managing it afterwards. The other two imperatives focus on managing yourself and managing your network. All three imperatives are about management with the first being about managing the workforce which definitely proves to be the most challenging of all as this is the age of diversity and managing a diverse workforce demands lots of tolerance and will power. This means that both tolerance and will power in addition to determination should together form the hallmark of a manager or a leader who wishes to fulfill the tense obligations of good management and leadership. Good managers should also become good leaders and (Anil, 2012) claims excellent visionary to be important for this. Summing up, this much becomes clear from the above discussion that without having a sound knowledge about management first, leadership becomes an obnoxiously tedious path to travel and an organization itself becomes subjected to myriad challenges like conflict, discrimination, high absenteeism rate, decreased productivity, weak communication, and zillion others. Leaders everywhere do not seem to be doing well after losing control of the management rope as it helps them in coordinating employees and maintaining a healthy communication flow. Top level management should be connected with employees even working at the lowest level in a firm by leaders if they desire to be recognized as the best and most reliable in the market. The whole concept of leading people without recognizing the worth of good management is utter absurdity. Even if a company is set up with the help of such leaders alone who do not have significant master’s control over management insights, that company is bound to crash down after just a couple of months as sound management is the key which unlocks power and transfers it to the wobbly knees of a newborn organization to make it fierce and healthy. References: Andersen, E 2012, Manage or Lead? 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