What Do Management and Leadership Have in Common - Essay Example

The paper “What Do Management and Leadership Have in Common?" is a   dramatic example of an essay on management. This paper presents a brief comparison between the two most important organizational aspects: management and leadership. Both these roles are critical for the successful execution of business activities. However, both these roles are different and they are used to achieve different goals. The basic purpose of this research is to compare both these terms.   

In a large number of researches and books, there has been much debate over the issue that does organizations need managers or leaders or both. In today’s dynamic environment organizations need strong leadership and management to achieve optimal effectiveness. Leadership is a function of management so a manager is needed to be able to lead. Mostly Leaders are thought to play an inspirational and visionary role for organizational members but managers are stuck to their routine operations. In this paper, the objective is to discuss the differences between the leadership and management, roles and responsibilities of leaders in creating a healthy organizational culture and recommendations to create a healthy organizational culture (Malex, 2008; Jadvar, 2010).

Most often the terms “management” and “leadership” are used interchangeably but in reality, there is a crucial difference between these two and the roles they both play. The main difference is that managers are the people who do things right but leaders are those who do the right thing. Management involves different kinds of processes like planning, budgeting, structuring roles, recruiting, and measuring performance. Management helps in the process of manufacturing and delivering the product or service as promised. But Leadership is entirely different. Leadership is about forecasting and exploiting the opportunities to excel in a competitive market. It’s about the vision, empowerment of the people and behaviors rather than focusing on an attribute (Kotter, 2013). Managers accept the status quo and they set hierarchies. They have their subordinates created by their circles of power while leaders have followers created by their circles of influence. Managers try to manage their work by controlling a group of entities to achieve organizational goals but leaders try to influence, motivate and enable others to take part in organizational success (Nayar, 2013). Managers tend to limit their focus on the day to day duties and a part of the organization while leaders have their focus on the horizon and bring real changes. Managers tend to administer people, focus on systems, ask how and when the type of questions about tasks but on the other side leaders tend to innovate, focus on people, and ask what and why type of questions about the tasks (Jadvar, 2010).

Each organization has its own culture that could be constructive or destructive. Leaders play a great role in making it constructive. Foremost, leaders have to play their inspirational role to motivate employees towards the vision of the organization that could lead to success. Secondly, leaders must promote channels that create open communication among organizational members to create a positive open culture. Thirdly, leaders must create a positive authority sense and create a sense of responsibility. Fourthly, Leaders must empower the employees to innovate, experiment through taking risks. Leaders must focus on developing people through coaching and democratic role to teamwork harmony among members. (Doucet, 2009).

The visionary role of a leader is far most important to achieve a healthy corporate culture. For Instance, US Postal Service is well known for its corporate culture and for huge success in the industry that was due to its first postmaster general; Benjamin Franklin, a very well-known leader. Franklin created a vision for the company that helped all the managers to base their strategies and made the business flourish until today. Leaders with empowering their employees and giving them shared values can create a winning culture. For example, Enterprise Rent-A-Car is such a company where all members can identify the company’s values, goals and they are as empowered as they can rent a car not only to drive home but also away from New York City. (Malex, 2008)  

Thus, it is concluded that leaders and managers are two different notions, managers can be made through organizational hierarchy but leaders can come from any side. Much of the literature shows that leaders can bring about a winning corporate culture through their motivational, inspirational and visionary roles.