ACADEMIA FORȚELOR TERESTRE ”NICOLAE BĂLCESCU”

Intelligence în organizații

Leadership and management must go

hand in hand

SIBIU, 2018
 There is no doubt that in an organization must be leaders and managers also.
But what if one person can be both, what if a person can inspire people and have
great organizing skills. Now that is a person which concentrates best efforts in
what he or she does. This person represents someone who can be trusted, can be
followed and obtains the best results for him and those under his or hers command.
For a better understanding of this concept, let’s analyze the definitions of the
leadership and management.
Leadership is the ability of a company's management to set and achieve
challenging goals, take swift and decisive action, outperform the competition, and
inspire others to perform well.
Management is the organization and coordination of the activities of a
business in order to achieve defined objectives.
At the first look these definitions are so similar that they produce confusions
sometimes. At a closer look though, we can se that leadership is about people, is
about taking decisions which include peoples desires and feelings. Management on
the other side is about working with different kind of resources based on numbers
and decisions systems.
A big difference between them is that leadership cannot be taught but can be
learned and management can be taught and learned. That means that a manager is
not always a leader too.
Let’s make an imagination exercise. Let us imagine a person that is a leader
but not a good manager, his name is John. John always wanted to work with people
so after some hard working years, he obtained the position of manager in a private
clinic. He cared about his people very much, so much that he ignored other aspects.
But as long as the doctors appreciated him, John was happy. He gave them free
time and raises. On the other side though, the advertising about the clinic was
ignored by John, less people were scheduled for surgery because of the shorter
program of the doctors and soon the budget of the clinic was grounded. John’s
situation is not very good no?
The other side of the coin would be if John was an excellent manager but a
weak leader. As in the other imagination exercise, John took the position of
manager in a clinic. This time he seen the opportunity to grow the clinic’s budget
by advertising and make the doctors stay longer at work and forcing them to work
under stress because he wanted the things to go right. Many of the doctors resigned
and went to another clinics.
 Both these problems could be solved easily, by building a team which leads
the organization and the important ones realized that.
For the sake of the situation let’s imagine that John was a good leader and a
good manager too. He could maybe gave free time to doctors in some days but
have normal program most of the time and the clinic could surely use some
advertising.
Leadership and management must go hand in hand. They are not the same
thing, but they are necessarily linked, and complementary. Any effort to separate
the two is likely to cause more problems than it solves.
There are many distinctions between the concepts of management and
leaderships. The managers are administers and leaders are innovates of the
organization. The managers can make development to the organization and can
decide what development should to do and how to do it. The leader mainly focuses
of peoples and their works and managers focus on system and structure. The
managers have a short-range view on the organization but leader has a long-range
perspective. Leaders know their own strengths and weakness. They can make
arguments and timely decisions. The qualities of leadership are motivation,
courage, decisiveness, initiative, integrity, loyalty, knowledge, ability to
communicate, judgment etc. and qualities of management are authority, discipline,
unity of command, subordinate of individual interests, specialization of labour,
initiative etc. Although there are some differences between leadership and
management, they are identical in practice. All the above qualities of manager are
vital for an effective leader.
When we talk about leadership, we must think about innovation and vision.
A leader has ideas, is a visionary which dares to dream and comes in front with
new concepts. For this ideas, people are following him knowing that such persons
bring the world to a new level. In management though is about bringing the
excellence to reality. Management means that a person which has a rock, can make
money from it, by turning it into a beautiful sculpture. Managers tend to view work
as an enabling process involving some combination of people and ideas interacting
to establish strategies and make decisions. They help the process along by
calculating the interests in opposition, planning when controversial issues should
surface, and reducing tensions. In this enabling process, managers’ tactics appear
flexible: on one hand, they negotiate and bargain; on the other, they use rewards,
punishments, and other forms of coercion.
 One without another can work, may even have good results but there is no
doubt that if they are combined there will be great results. Having an idea and
make it work excellent at the highest level is something that not any person can do.
Just as different styles of leadership must be adopted for each organisation
or team, in some cases, leaders must also become managers. This is particularly
true in highly formalised contexts often with ingrained traditional structures and
rigorous oversight such as education and health care. Indeed, the combination of a
strong leader and smart manager can help industries break out of traditional
thinking while still ensuring high standards.
Finding balance is more important than the distinction between management
and leadership. There are times when management is important, especially when it
comes to ensuring the successful completion of projects, measuring performance
and other tactical competencies. But it’s those who can move beyond tactical
perspective to a more strategic view of an organisation and its staff that make for
the most effective leaders overall.
Many businesses fall into the trap of believing that experience makes a good
boss. However, while experience is valuable in managerial roles, an effective
people manager – and there may be many scattered at all levels throughout a
business - is someone who is both a manager and a leader and is skilled at
combining the two to achieve a goal.
In a people-driven economy where a company’s greatest asset lies in its
staff, the ability of those in managerial positions to not only manage but also lead
is one paramount to success. Management and leadership complement each other
and successful people managers will use both to move the business forward.
In conclusion, Leadership and manager must go in hand to hand. They are
practically similar and identical. Leadership is about getting management to do the
things that need to done. Management is about doing the things that leaders believe
is critical to the success of the organization. "The art of getting things done through
people"(Mary Parker Follett (1869). In short, being a successful leader also means
having the skills and ability to be an effective manager. Managers can display
leadership abilities. Contrariwise, leadership efforts can help to become a good
manager. There for it is safe to say that you have to be a good manager to be an
effective leader.