A manager may be a leader, a manager may not be a leader, but a leader may emerge who is not a manager. This saying shows that roles of manager and leader not to be connected at all. However, for a business to be effective, managers must learn how to become leaders by developing effective leadership skills. A leader means a person that holds a dominant or superior position within its field, and is able to exercise a high degree of control or influence over others. A leader is one who has followers. Followers follow leaders because they are influenced by the leader’s personality and share belief in the leader’s visions, goals and values. Leaders gain personal power through credibility. They can communicate their beliefs to team members, who understand that these beliefs will not alter or vary because of circumstances and will become the rock on which their working relationship can develop. Leadership is no longer the responsibility of a few senior managers and directors.
A manager is an individual who is in charge of a certain group of tasks, or a certain subset of a company. A manager often has a staff of people who report to him or her. As an example, a restaurant will often have a front-of-house manager who helps the patrons, and supervises the hosts. In addition, a specific office project can have a manager, known simply as the project manager. Certain departments within a company designate their managers to be line managers, while others are known as staff managers, depending upon the functionality of the department. A manager has a job to do and is required to fulfill it. Not essentially all managers are leaders. Managers may have an ideal leader whose style they may adopt. Leadership skills are generally inferred learnt and developed because of exposure, interaction and practice.
Differences Between Leadership and Management
Leadership may be seen in terms of creating and inspiring change. The leader does this by inspiring people, giving a sense of vision and providing a good example. Good leaders are made not born. If we have the desire and willpower, we can become an effective leader. Good leaders develop through a never ending process of self-study, education, training, and experience. This guide will help throughout that process. To inspire our workers into higher levels of teamwork, there are certain things we must be, know, and, do. These do not come naturally, but are acquired through continual work and study. Good leaders are continually working and studying to improve their leadership skills. They are not resting on their laurels.
Leadership is a process by which a person influences others to accomplish an objective and directs the organization in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent. Leadership is a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal. Leaders carry out this process by applying their leadership knowledge and skills. This is called Process Leadership. However, we know that we have traits that can influence our actions. This is called Trait Leadership, in that it was once common to believe that leaders were born rather than made.
While leadership is learned, the skills and knowledge processed by the leader can be influenced by his or hers attributes or traits, such as beliefs, values, ethics, and character. Knowledge and skills contribute directly to the process of leadership, while the other attributes give the leader certain characteristics that make him or her unique. Skills, knowledge, and attributes make the Leader, which is one of the four factors of leadership.
We must have an honest understanding of who we are, what we know, and what we can do. It is the followers, not the leader or someone else who determines if the leader is successful. If they do not trust or lack confidence in their leader, then they will be uninspired. To be successful we have to convince our followers, not ourselves or our superiors, that we are worthy of being followed. Different people require different styles of leadership. For example, a new hire requires more supervision than an experienced employee. A person who lacks motivation requires a different approach than one with a high degree of motivation. We must know our people. The fundamental starting point is having a good understanding of human nature, such as needs, emotions, and motivation. We must come to know our employees’ be, know, and do attributes.
Besides that, we lead through two-way communication. Much of it is nonverbal. For instance, when we “set the example” that communicates to our people that we would not ask them to perform anything that we would not be willing to do. What and how we communicate either builds or harms the relationship between us and our employees. All situations are different. What we do in one situation will not always work in another. We must use our judgment to decide the best course of action and the leadership style needed for each situation. For example, we may need to confront an employee for inappropriate behavior, but if the confrontation is too late or too early, too harsh or too weak, then the results may prove ineffective. Also note that the situation normally has a greater effect on a leader’s action than his or her traits. This is because while traits may have an impressive stability over a period of time, they have little consistency across situations.This is why a number of leadership scholars think the Process Theory of Leadership is a more accurate than the Trait Theory of Leadership.
Various forces will affect these four factors. Examples of forces are our relationship with our seniors, the skill of our followers, the informal leaders within our organization, and how our organization is organized. Although our position as a manager, supervisor, lead, etc. gives us the authority to accomplish certain tasks and objectives in the organization which is called Assigned Leadership, this power does not make us a leader, it simply makes us the boss. Leadership differs in that it makes the followers want to achieve high goals which are called Emergent Leadership, rather than simply bossing people around.
The most important key to effective leadership is trust and confidence, which in top leadership was the single most reliable predictor of employee satisfaction in an organization. Besides that, effective communication by leadership in three critical areas was the key to winning organizational trust and confidence known as helping employees understand the company’s overall business strategy and helping employees understand how they contribute to achieving key business objectives. Sharing information with employees on both how the company is doing and how an employee’s own division is doing is also relative to strategic business objectives. So in a nutshell we must be trustworthy and you have to be able to communicate a vision of where the organization needs to go.
A principle of leadership which is important is to know you and seek self-improvement. In order to do this, you need to understand your be, know and do, attributes. Besides that, you need to be technically proficient. As a leader, you must know your job, and have a solid familiarity with your employees tasks. Leaders must set good example to their employees. If you are leader who can be trusted, then those around you will grow to respect you.
On the other hand, management in all business and organizational activities is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively. Management comprises planning, organizing, staffing, leading or directing, and controlling an organization (a group of one or more people or entities) or effort for the purpose of accomplishing a goal. Resourcing encompasses the deployment and manipulation of human resources, financial resources, technological resources, and natural resources. Because organizations can be viewed as systems, management can also be defined as human action, including design, to facilitate the production of useful outcomes from a system. This view opens the opportunity to ‘manage’ oneself, a pre-requisite to attempting to manage others. Directors and managers have the power and responsibility to make decisions to manage an enterprise. As a discipline, management comprises the interlocking functions of formulating corporate policy and organizing, planning, controlling, and directing the firm’s resources to achieve the policy’s objectives. The size of management can range from one person in a small firm to hundreds or thousands of managers in multinational companies. In large firms the board of directors formulates the policy which is implemented by the chief executive officer.
In for-profit work, management has as its primary function the satisfaction of a range of stakeholders. This typically involves making a profit for the shareholders, creating valued products at a reasonable cost for customers, and providing rewarding employment opportunities for employees. In nonprofit management, add the importance of keeping the faith of donors. In most models of management/governance, shareholders vote for the board of directors, and the board then hires senior management. Some organizations have experimented with other methods such as employee-voting models of selecting or reviewing managers, but this occurs only very rarely.