Manager vs Leader

INTRODUCTION

Leadership and management are two different operating sistems. Each one has it’s own purpose and characteristics. Both are necessary to succeed in a volatile and complex business area.

With a careful selection, development and encouragement, dozens of people can have important leadership roles in a company. While they are improving their leadership abilities, the companies must not loose sight of the fact that a strong leadership and weak management situation is worse than the opposite. The true challenge is combining leadership abilities with management skills, using them to create a mutual balance.

Smart companies use to highlight both leaders and managers and try to make them work as a team. Without a good management complex organizations tend to become chaotic in a way that it could endanger even their own existence. A good management strategy brings order and consistency in key domains such as the quality and the profitability of the products. Leadership means fighting with change. One of the reasons that it became so important in the last few years is that the business world became much more competitive and volatile.

The bigger the changes are, the more leadership is needed. This two different tasks – the struggle with complexity and the struggle with change – establish the essential roles for leadership and management. Each method involves some decisions regarding the needs that must be satisfied, creating networks and relationships between people in order to create a schedule (agenda). This kind of system tries to assure that these people can bring into effect all these instructions.

The companies that struggle with the complexity of planning establish future goals, then clarify the detailed steps that need to be taken in order to achieve those goals, and finally the resource allocation. Leading the company toward constructive changes starts with establishing a direction – developing a vision along with the necessary changes to achieve this vision.

Management develops this kind of ability to fulfill the company’s goal through organization and coordination – creating an organizational structure and a set of jobs to accomplish the plan’s requirements, hiring qualified people, communicating with the employees, delegating responsibilities and developing systems to monitor the plan’s development.

A leaders equivalent purpose is to guide people. This means creating new paths for those who are able to create groups that understand their vision and are dedicated to implement it.

Finally a manager makes sure that the plans are carried into effect by controlling and problem solving ( monitoring the results with the help of reports, meetings and other instruments ), identifying the deviations and then organizing and making plans in order to solve the problems.

Beside the fact that a good leader must me motivated, he also needs to be inspired and animated in order to acheve his goals.

MANAGER

The most important character that can fill in a managing position is the manager. The manager is a person who despite the chores, the abilities and the responsibilities that come with the job description, there are some management processes, therefore they make decisions and initiate actions through which they influence other persons’ decisional and operational behavior.

The French define management as “the science of leading techniques in an enterprise”. A similar definition is offered by Wolfram Neubauer: “ The manager refers to the specific tasks of a company and they represent more than it’s simple administration.” The quality of the managing process as well as the results obtained by the firm depends on the managers that run these tasks. The manager is considered to be the man with new developing requirements and carrying a job that involves a high standard of knowledge and skills that in order to perfect them a person must need to go through a long and complex process.

The manager’s position can be filled by only one person ( which usually happens ) or by a group of people.

A manager must perform five basic tasks: forecast, organize, coordinate, train and evaluation, but today in a competitive and always changing environment the manager’s role is extremely complex. His actions and decisions influence the actions and decisions of other employees with lower ranks, and by taking these decisions the manager monitors the fulfillment of some objectives.

Basically a manager is a person or a group of persons that in virtue of the tasks, abilities, and responsibilities required by this job, he makes decisions and initiate actions which influence others decisional and functional behavior.