Management

Management and Leadership Paper

In understanding the difference between managers and leaders, one must define each. A manager must have primarily technical, logistical skills. Management is consistency for better results, maintaining the status quo and focusing on short-term results. Management is about completing a project on time and on budget. The main purpose of a manager is to maximize the output of the organization through administrative implementation. To achieve this, managers must undertake the functions of organizing, planning, staffing, leading, and controlling. Within these functions a manager establishes goals

Leadership involves challenging the process, inspiring a shared vision, enabling others to act, model the way, and encourage people. A leader must have people skills. Leaders also get people moving in the same direction by using brainstorming and planning sessions. Leadership and management, therefore, seem to challenge each other.

While management and leadership are unique, there is a link between them. It is clear that different problems require different solutions at different times. Rather than being mutually exclusive, these two competencies are, in fact, interdependent.

For example, once a leader articulates the intended direction, plans must be put in place to provide concrete ways to move in that direction. Once people have been hired into an organization, the structure of which was defined by a manager, a leader must align those people with a vision. Finally, the leader must motivate and inspire people to overcome the challenges that management processes of controlling and measuring have uncovered.

In examining the potential for change, there are three possible assessments that can be made other than maintaining an acceptable status quo: that something needs to be improved; that something is broken, but can be fixed; or that something needs to be done differently.