Leaders Vs Managers

Do organizations need more of leaders or managers?

Leaders and Managers are completely different sets of people with dissimilar abilities and strengths. But most frequently people fail to recognize the difference between the two kind of personalities and club both of them into a single pool. It is important to understand the difference between the two in order to employ the required talent to use for smooth and profitable running of the business.

Leaders influence others, provide direction to people while Managers work towards accomplishing the responsibility given to them. Leaders are intuitive and thrive on risk. They tend to motivate people towards their ideas. Leaders are active instead of reactive on the other hand Managers tend to adopt reactive attitude towards theirs goals. Managers adopt orderly work patterns and avoid taking risk.

Managers do the things right while the leaders do the right things. Managers have short term goals while leaders have vision. Leadership is not a replacement to management and is necessarily not better than management. While managerial qualities can be acquired or learnt through management training, many of those leadership traits tend to come as part of the person's persona. This means that all leaders can be trained to be managers but not all managers can be trained to be leaders.

An organization requires an optimal mix of both leadership and management skills for it to be profitable. Management provides the processes and procedures for a business to operate while Leadership provides direction and vision to the business. Thus proves beyond doubt that both leaders and managers are equally important for an organization.

Generally managers work as though things would remain same while leaders work as though everything will change. Keeping in mind an accelerating pace of change in today's context , I personally feel that Leadership is more important than any other skill. Since leaders change before they have to and hence gain competitive advantage over others.