Leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action. Each has its own function and characteristic activities. Both are necessary for success in an increasingly complex and volatile business environment…strong leadership with weak management is no better, and is sometimes actually worse, than the reverse. The real challenge is to combine strong leadership and strong management and use each to balance the other.
– John Kotter, Management/Leadership Author and Professor of Organizational Behavior, Harvard Business School
In current challenging business environment, where mastering agile project management is must for any organization, we need to adopt an interpersonal approach to govern human resource, rather than directing, command and control model. Instead of directing people, what to do – we need to emphasis on creating an environment where people willingly take the responsibility of the work to do, what needs to be done.
Management and leadership can better understand as a tug of war, where these two environments pulling each other to accomplish organizational goal with minimal efforts and resource utilization.
Management is more mechanical in nature and occasionally micromanagement is required. It is more concerned about task, control and the speed of execution. Whereas leadership takes more liberal, humanistic approach to focus on people and purpose. It is more about, resource empowerment, effective utilization and doing the right things.
This leads to a discussion, whether leadership is better than management or vice versa?
We defiantly need a mechanism to perfectly balance both leadership and managerial skills to be truly effective, we need to have a layer of leadership on top of management mechanics to best amplify team’s productivity by a combination of leadership and management.
