Leadership and

management: Spotting
the difference
Expert perspective
Ron Glatter,
Emeritus Professor
of Educational Administration and
Management, The Open University,
Visiting Professor, Institute of Education,
University of London and Hon. President,
British Educational Leadership,
Management and Administration Society
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Ron Glatter
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Leadership and management: they are such familiar words these days but it is worth spending
some time to think about them. I want to argue two things:
• The distinction between leadership and management has been exaggerated
and this has damaging consequences.
• To the extent that you can properly distinguish between the two, it’s important
to recognise fully the central importance of management.

I’m not trying to say that you can’t distinguish between them, but it’s by no means a hard
and fast distinction. Here is one way (there are many) of trying to explain the difference:
. . . leadership is more to do with the visionary, creative, motivational and inspirational
aspects of organising, whereas managing is more to do with the effective operation
of useful routines.
Burgoyne and Williams, 2007, p.3

Look at this formulation carefully. Is there anything about it that occurs to you?
Two things strike me. First, it has very blurred edges: leadership is “more to do with… ”,
just as managing is “more to do with… ”. This suggests a lot of overlap between them.
And, secondly, there is the suggestion that both are aspects of a single overall task: organising.
Hold on to that idea as I want to come back to it later.
You might want to compare that statement with the quote from Cuban (1988):
By leadership, I mean influencing others’ actions in achieving desirable ends. Leaders
are people who shape the goals, motivations, and actions of others. Frequently they
initiate change to reach existing and new goals . . . leadership . . . takes . . . much
ingenuity, energy, and skill…

Managing is maintaining efficiently and effectively current organizational arrangements.

While managing well often exhibits leadership skills… the overall direction is toward
maintenance rather than change. I prize both managing and leading and attach no
special value to either one since different settings and times call for varied responses.
Cuban, 1988.xx

These statements, in my view, make a stronger distinction than is present in the previous quote
from Burgoyne and Williams, and, although Cuban says he doesn’t privilege leadership
over management (“I… attach no special value to either”), he seems to be doing just
that by saying that leadership takes “much ingenuity, energy and skill”, implying that
management doesn’t.

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I think there are a number of potential dangers with the practice of drawing sharp lines
between the two concepts. Here are four.
• It can encourage the idea that some people do exclusively ‘leadership work’ and others
do exclusively ‘management work’. As I will argue later, this is highly questionable.
• It can promote a divorce between ‘vision’ and ‘implementation’. This can be dangerous
when many imaginative and promising ideas break down at the implementation stage.
• It can create an artificial separation between ‘intuition’ and ‘analysis’, and also between
‘inspiration’ and ‘rational’ systems.
• Most serious of all, it can result in a neglect of the ‘basics’.
On this last point, a great organisational theorist, James March, long ago stressed the
importance of what he called “elementary competence”, which he thought was often
underrated in programmes of leadership development compared with “lofty conceptions
of the head’s role” and notions of heroic leadership that are likely to be in conflict with
reality (March, 1978, p.223).
Of course, this raises the whole question of how much control leaders actually have.
Reviewing studies in all kinds of organisations, including educational ones, Pfeffer and
Sutton say that “the effects of leadership on performance are modest under most conditions,
strong under a few conditions and absent in others… Organisational performance is
determined largely by factors that no individual – including the leader – can control”
(2006, p.192). They point out that, in contrast to Asian and other cultures that emphasise
groups and institutions more than we do, in our individualistic culture we tend to romanticise
leaders to an extent that outstrips the evidence. Or, as Bolman and Deal cogently put it,
we have come to “focus too much on the actors and too little on the stage on which they
play their parts” (1991, p.408).
The literature shows that “the best groups perform better than the best individuals”, say
Pfeffer and Sutton (2006), which sounds like an endorsement of distributed leadership as
discussed in Bush and Glover’s paper (Bush and Glover, 2014). “Build effective teams and
reliable systems that work rather than seeking to become a heroic saviour” is their message.
I think that advice has never been more timely than it is today. One analysis of educational
institutions in the 1970s saw them as ‘organised anarchies’ (March and Olsen, 1976). There
may still be many schools that merit this description, but the huge emphasis on performance
and ‘hard’ measures of outcome, coupled with public demand for high reliability in schooling,
make it critical that we take management as seriously as leadership and that the two are
closely linked.
Note that saying this is not at all the same as arguing for the primacy of what Bush and
Glover call ‘managerial leadership’ in their paper (Bush and Glover, 2014). There must be
a management dimension to all their models of leadership, but, as they warn, a purely
managerial – or so-called ‘managerialist’ – approach is likely to be stultifying.

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Delving into history

A little excursion into recent history will be useful here. The first serious interest in the
UK in what we now call educational leadership and management developed in the late
1960s and early 1970s, mainly prompted by the move to comprehensive secondary schools
in many parts of the country. They tended to be larger and more complex institutions than
their predecessors, and it was realised that running them was no small task. The term
‘educational administration’ was often used, partly because it was widely employed in
North America where training for senior posts had been common for many years, whereas
it was only just starting in the UK. In 1972, I wrote a book entitled Management development
for the education profession. This barely mentioned leadership because it wasn’t a term in
general use in education. Even ‘management’ was unfamiliar, though it had been increasingly
used outside education, both in companies and in the public service.
I argued that there was no distinction in practice between ‘administration’ and ‘management’,
and I took them both to mean “the process of securing decisions about what activities the
organisation (or unit of an organisation) will undertake, and mobilising the human and
material resources to undertake them” (Glatter, 1972, p.5). It’s interesting to compare this
definition with two more recent definitions of leadership. One sees leadership as “the work
of mobilising and influencing others to articulate and achieve the school’s shared intentions
and goals” (Leithwood and Riehl, 2005, p.14). A very recent definition goes a step further:
“Leadership is a social influence process guided by a moral purpose with the aim of building
capacity by optimising available resources towards the achievement of shared goals”
(Dimmock, 2012, p.7).
Have a look at the three definitions above and identify the areas of overlap and the differences
between them. You might want to attempt your own definition.
Certainly, there seems to be a large area of overlap – in relation to ideas such as identifying
what we now call ‘directions of travel’ and mobilizing resources, reinforcing my argument
that distinctions between leadership and management can be overdone. However, the
two more recent definitions talk not only about what is to be done – the activities, as I put
it in my early definition – but also about the achievement of agreed goals, reflecting the
much greater emphasis, in recent years, on outcomes. The last one also refers to how the
task is carried out – through a “social influence process guided by a moral purpose” – giving
the definition a distinctively educational edge. Neither of these differences is, in my view,
specifically related to a distinction between leadership and management.
The 1970s and 1980s saw a significant growth in research and training in ‘educational
management’, but the term ‘leadership’ only became widely used towards the end of the
1990s. Bush (2008) sees this as a reaction to the effects of the Education Reform Act of
1988, which gave schools much greater power in allocating resources, and so they had
to focus much more on managing people and finances. In the later 1990s, in Bush’s view,
a rebalancing took place towards the professional role of heads and other senior staff,
which led to the emergence of ‘leadership’.

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The sociologist Gerald Grace published an influential book in 1995 pointedly called School
leadership – Beyond education management. He saw ‘management’ as expressive of a narrow
technical and top-down approach and thought that ‘leadership’ conveyed a much stronger
indication of the moral and participative aspects of running educational institutions. The
term was officially sanctioned when the then government established the National College
for School Leadership in 2000.
The shift was not without its critics. A prominent international researcher referred, in 2002,
to the “overwhelming discursive prominence” given to leadership “rather than to management
and administration”, and to what he considered the unrealistic emphasis on “super leadership”
in UK official expectations (Gronn, 2002, p.564). This type of reaction raised the question as
to whether the balance had tilted too far away from management.

Correcting the balance

As Bush and Glover say in their paper, research shows that successful schools tend to
have a determined focus on high-quality teaching and learning (Bush and Glover, 2014).
It is a point reinforced in a major evidence-based report by the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) on improving school leadership. The OECD says
that, where schools have greater autonomy, as is now the case in many countries and
notably in England, it is particularly important that the responsibilities of school leaders
are strongly focused on the domains linked to improved teaching and learning and student
outcomes, otherwise autonomy can lead to role overload and attention may be deflected
from instructional leadership (Pont et al, 2008).
There are some signs that this danger is a real one. A 2012 study of the school leadership
landscape for the National College commented on the increasing complexity of school
leadership in general and headship in particular, and concluded that “there is a substantial
risk… that the nature and demands of current policy change will disrupt the focus of schools
and leaders from teaching and learning and their authentic improvement” (National College
for School Leadership, 2012, p.12).
I think there are implications here for our discussion about leadership and management.
You might want to reflect for a few minutes on what implications you can see before I make
my comments.
It is certainly the case that in today’s more autonomous schools there is a great deal to
organise beyond teaching and learning and its improvement, particularly where schools
are responsible for premises as well as finances, staff, other resources and much else.
These latter responsibilities are often seen as ‘managerial’, whereas matters to do with
teaching and learning and student achievement are classified as ‘leadership’. In my view,
this sharp distinction is misleading. For example, the OECD report that I mentioned above,
which emphasised the need to ensure a focus on educational matters in autonomous
schools, identified a range of management tasks related to improved student outcomes.

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These were concerned with “setting learning objectives and implementing intelligent
assessment systems” and the “purposeful use of data”, which are “the dynamic aspects
of managing curriculum and instruction” (Pont et al, 2008, p.44). A similar point was made
in Ofsted’s 2012 report Getting to good: how headteachers achieve success. Ofsted too
emphasised the need for “robust management systems” in securing educational improvement:
“For example, [headteachers in improving schools] use close measuring and tracking
of pupils’ progress and monitoring and evaluation procedures that are sharply focused
on their priorities for improvement” (Ofsted, 2012, p.4).
The OECD report also stressed the importance of closely aligning the use of resources
with pedagogical purposes. This is a useful reminder that many apparently non-educational
activities turn out, on close consideration, to have significant educational effects and so
they have leadership as well as management implications.
Let me try to relate this discussion to the Bush and Glover paper (Bush and Glover, 2014).
I’ve suggested that their model, called ‘leadership for learning’ (or ‘instructional leadership’),
contains both leadership and management elements that are hard to separate from one
another in practice, and that the latter – the management elements – are a critical component
of the entire process. Similar points can be made about, for example, ‘distributed leadership’.
If leadership is to be widely distributed, the management task of bringing it all together,
of making it ‘joined up’ in the current parlance, is a vital one. This is a task that people in
‘school business manager’ and equivalent posts may often be as well placed as senior
teaching staff to carry out. Much the same can be said about ‘system leadership’. The more
that schools are grouped together in various kinds of arrangement, such as chains,
federations or alliances, then the more the management task of co-ordination becomes
as important and challenging as the leadership task of setting a direction and fostering
commitment, and the two types of task can meld into one another.
One useful way of looking at this and seeing the intimate connection between leadership
and management is through the lens of problem-solving. One noted theorist classified
organisational situations as either ‘high ground’ – fairly straightforward ones needing mainly
technical solutions – or ‘swamp’ – messy, wicked, confusing ones (Schön, 1983). Many problems
in schools relate to swamp situations needing skills of both leadership and management;
think of most resource allocation decisions, for example timetabling. And, of course, society
expects schools to both lead and manage well, to be creative and innovative but, at the
same time, to ‘deliver’ dependable performance and guaranteed effectiveness. In other words,
to be ‘high-reliability’ organisations (Leithwood et al, 1999).
At the start, I asked you to keep in mind the suggestion of regarding both leadership and
management as aspects of a single overall task: organising. Organisation – in the sense of
an activity rather than an entity, such as a school or a club – is often thought of mainly as
dull, routine, low-level work. I find this strange. In my view, nothing worthwhile on any scale
can be achieved without it. Organisation matters enormously, as the success of the London
Olympics demonstrated. The idea that it is an impersonal, mechanical type of activity is belied

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by the fact that the word is related to organism – with its connotations of life and growth –
and not mechanism. Nor should there be an implication that it is simply about carrying
out what someone else has decided. My Concise Oxford Thesaurus gives a number of possible
synonyms for ‘organize’ that challenge that interpretation, including ‘establish’, ‘create’,
‘originate’, ‘build’, ‘shape’ and ‘be in charge of’ that are commonly associated with leadership,
as well as ‘coordinate’ and ‘systematize’ that tend to be thought of more as management
functions.
There have been other attempts to bridge the leadership–management divide. For example,
the musical metaphor of ‘orchestration’ has been proposed to counter the common emphasis
on charismatic ‘transformational’ leadership, which “overplays the extent of designated
leaders’ agency and underplays factors that delimit what leaders can do” (Wallace, 2007, p.25).
The idea of orchestration is argued to be more in line with the real world of practice in
capturing the search for coherence and manageability given the complexity and ambiguity
of life in modern educational organisations and the many ‘swamp’ situations that arise in
them. The term is also said to be useful in avoiding “the distinction implied by leadership
and management between making new things happen and keeping new things on track…”
(Wallace, 2007, p.27). While I would go along with much of this analysis (see, for example,
Glatter, 2008, 2009), you should be aware that the research that gave rise to the idea of
orchestration related to activities of a system leadership type, and it may be less relevant
to smaller-scale contexts such as individual schools or departments.
In my 1972 book I said “there is no fully satisfactory term” (Glatter, 1972, p.5), and this is
probably still the case today. It is, nevertheless, worth considering the strengths and
limitations of the terms that are in general use, not as an arid semantic exercise but because
they tend to shape the way we think and see our world. I’m suggesting here that, while it
is not quite true to say that leadership and management are indivisible, it’s misleading to
see them as disconnected from each other and especially to regard either as having supremacy.
They need to be conjoined within a wider perspective on the task of organisation.
How clearly can you distinguish leadership from management in your own work and/or the
work of your colleagues? Think of some examples. Does it seem an accurate and helpful
distinction? If not, how would you prefer to describe this aspect of educational work?

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References
Bolman, L G & Deal, T E, 1991, Reframing organizations: artistry, choice and leadership,
San Francisco, USA, Jossey-Bass
Burgoyne, J & Williams, S, 2007, NCSL leadership development literature review: issues from
the literature on management and leadership and organisation development with reference
to NCSL’s provision, Henley Management College for the National College for School
Leadership
Bush, T, 2008, From management to leadership: semantic or meaningful change?,
in Educational Management Administration and Leadership, Volume 36, Number 2,
pp.271–288
Bush, T & Glover, D, 2014, School Leadership: Concepts and Evidence, National College
for Teaching and Leadership
Cuban, L, 1988, The managerial imperative and the practice of leadership in schools,
Albany, New York, USA, State University of New York Press
Dimmock, C, 2012, Leadership, Capacity Building and School Improvement: concepts,
themes and impact, London, Routledge
Glatter, R, 1972, Management development for the education profession, London, Harrap
Glatter, R, 2008, Organization and leadership in education: changing direction, in
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Heidelberg, Germany, Springer
Glatter, R, 2009, Wisdom and bus schedules: developing school leadership, in School
Leadership & Management, Volume 29, Number 3, pp.225–237
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scholarship, London, The Falmer Press
Gronn, P, 2002, Designer leadership: the emerging global adoption of preparation
standards, in Journal of School Leadership, Volume 12, pp.552–578, September 2002
Leithwood, K, Jantzi, D & Steinbach, R, 1999, Changing leadership for changing times,
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March, J G, 1978, American public school administration: a short analysis, in The School
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from evidence-based management, Boston, USA, Harvard Business School Press
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Blackwell Publishing

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