Management is NOT Leadership
This week in our company-wide morning meeting the topic of discussion happened to be the difference between management and leadership. It was led with great examples and analogies and articles to support their claims. “Management Is (Still) Not Leadership” written for the Harvard Business Review was one of the articles they passed out for everyone to dive deeper into on their own.
I’m pretty sure I’m one of the only people that actually went ahead and read it. So for my colleagues and everyone else, here are the take-away points made:
- Management and Leadership are radically different.
- This “misunderstanding gets in the way of any reasonable discussion about how to build a company, position it for success and win in the twenty-first century.”
- Management – “a set of well-known processes, which help an organization to predictably do what it knows how to do well.”
- Leadership – “is about vision, about people buying in, about empowerment, and most of all, about producing useful change.”
- They serve different but essential functions and therefore cannot replace one another in a business.
The article brings it home by stating that very few organizations have sufficient leadership in place and until this is solved organizations have a huge hurdle to overcome.
Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/kotter/2013/01/management-is-still-not-leadership.html