How Managers Differ From Leaders

• What is management and how does it differ from leadership?
• Leaders direct, managers execute.
• Management is like investment - getting the best return from all resources - your own energy, talent and time plus all other resources at your disposal. This is the best definition of management.
  
• Management means efficiency, profitability. It depends on minimal inputs for maximum returns. Like the 80-20 rule.
• To be a good manager, regularly review your priorities, just as you would your investments.
• The same person can be both a leader and a manager - they are different functions - like sales and marketing - they serve different organizational purposes or functions.
• Managers are like sports coaches - they inspire and develop people to get the best peformance out of them.
• They also provide structure and meaure output.
• The meaning of leadership is to champion change. Leaders may or may not manage people.
• Management is a role, a set of responsibilities.
• Leadership is not a role. It is an occasional act, like creativity.
• Managers can be inspiring, empowering, nurturing, supportive and encouraging. An inspiring leader moves us to change direction. An inspiring manager moves us to work harder.
• Managers use open questions to draw solutions out of others as a way of reaching better decisions, fostering broader ownership and developing people.
• By contrast, leaders propose novel solutions. They want to persuade prospective followers that they know a better way of doing things.
• Managers occupy a role of responsibility for people. They may show leadership too, but leadership can also be shown by non-managers.
• By clearly separating leadership and management, we are better able to explain how all employees can show leadership without having to be in management roles.

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Can management shed its negative image, be reinvented for the 21st century and differentiated from leadership? See Leadership and Management Reinvented. Also 21st Century Management.

We have an ideal image of leaders that actually says more about us and our needs than it does about leadership.

Do you think leadership should be redefined for a knowledge-driven world? Is our current concept of leadership not working? Is there room for heroic leadership today or is it now all about post-heroic leadership? Is emotional intelligence essential for leadership? Is leadership a role, like being a CEO?

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Challenging conventional thinking about leadership

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