Difference of Leadership and Their Respective Functions

How to differentiate leadership from management

John Kotter was on the right track in saying that leaders and managers have different functions. But, crucially, we need to stick to a functional story, where everyone can engage in some managing and some leading regardless of role or style:

Leadership promotes new directions; management executes existing directions.

If you are seeking new directions then you must have leadership qualities and when you ave found out the required directions then it is the function of management o get them executed.

The function of management

Management can do much more than merely keep things ticking over. It manages complex projects ranging from making a major movie to putting the first man on the moon. Managers can use facilitative skills to foster innovation. By sticking to a purely functional definition, we leave completely open the question of style. This liberating move means that managers can be inspiring. They can empower, nurture and develop talent. An inspiring leader influences us to change direction while an inspiring manager motivates us to work harder. Managers needn't be restricted to mechanical control, transactional rewards, bureaucratic methods or relating without empathy. Portraying managers in such negative terms was an accident of history that we now must put behind us.

To get the best out of knowledge workers, managers might set up self-managing teams. Here, the classic functions of management (planning, organizing and controlling) are delegated. But the function of management is still operating even though the manager is not personally doing it. This should dispel the myth of the manager as a control freak or bureaucrat.

By removing all style connotations, leadership benefits as much as management. No longer needing to be inspiring cheerleaders, leaders find it possible to exhibit quiet, factual leadership. This is essential in technical contexts, where a hard business case often moves stakeholders more than an inspirational delivery. Not being committed by definition to any particular style, both leaders and managers are free to use any style that works for the context in which they want to make a difference.

The function of leadership

Leadership needs to narrow its focus to promoting new directions as one-off acts to promote a better way:

• The developer of PlayStation promoted this new product to Sony management, thus showing bottom-up leadership.
• An exceptional customer service associate shows leadership by example to colleagues.
• Martin Luther King promoted justice by marching against segregation on buses.
• Jack Welch showed leadership by example to businesses all over the world when he implemented ideas at GE such as the need to be first or second in a market.

Key features of leadership reinvented

• It consists in showing a better way, either by explicit advocacy or by example.
• Those who are led may not report to the person showing leadership, even informally.
• No implementation is entailed. This is management's domain, getting work done through others, motivating people, developing them (more on management below.)
• It does not involve managing the people led or getting things done through them.
• It comes to an end once the target audience buys the need to change. It sells the tickets for the journey; management drives the bus to the destination.
• It relies on influence; since it’s not an actual role, it can't decide for the group.
• It can promote ideas developed by others; no need to be creative personally.

Conventional leadership is a static concept: gaining and holding a position of power in a fixed hierarchy. Such leaders have a stake in the status quo. But rapid change driven by innovation has created a more dynamic context in which leadership has to operate. The rise of the creative class locates the emergence of new directions at the front lines. The advocacy of new directions becomes leadership when the group follows or adopts the proposed change. Since it’s not a role, leadership occurs only when people follow an influence attempt.

In a dynamic context, no one has a monopoly on good ideas. Creative class leadership is ephemeral, no longer a role. Being so fleeting, leadership shifts dynamically from one person to another, much as in guerrilla warfare, thus spelling the end of static, role-based leadership.