A heated debate among some colleagues about the prominence of management or leadership in Peter Drucker’s writings pushed me to think about an important question that I have been struggling with for quite a long time: Do the differences between “managing” and “leading” mount up to a contradiction between them?
Later in another post, I will get to an in-depth analysis of Peter Drucker’s writings to shed a more definitive light on which one, management or leadership, has been at the center of attention for Peter Drucker. But in this post, I would like to write about what I refer to as the false management-leadership dichotomy in commentary about these topics. To this goal, I start by listing some of the alleged differences between leaders and managers noted by Warren Bennis (1987) in his famous book,
On Becoming a Leader
:
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The manager does things right; the leader does the right thing
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The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.
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The manager administers; the leader innovates.
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The manager maintains; the leader develops.
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The manager focuses on systems and structure; the leader focuses on people. The manager relies on control; the leader inspires trust. The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range perspective.
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The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why.
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The manager has an eye always on the bottom line; the leader has an eye on the horizon.
Looking at this list reminds me of the very many articles or blog posts I have read in which authors assumed an inherent contradiction between
leadership and management roles. For example, in one of the chapters of the management textbook that I use for teaching principles of
management, a manager is portrayed as a bureaucrat focused only on efficiency and short-term goals while the leader is glorified as a visionary architect of future goals and directions. The problem with a polarized conversation illustrated by this example, as well as the bullet points above, is that it creates a false dichotomy (e.g., either/or mentality) and implies superiority of one aspect over another.
I acknowledge the conceptual differences between these constructs of management and leadership, but I am bewildered by the false dichotomization of these concepts. In my opinion, contradicting the leadership and management roles is not productive and creates more harm than benefit to the public discourse about these important topics. Apart from the evident conceptual differences between the constructs of leadership and management, which understandably warrant scientific clarification, leadership and management should both be viewed as important skills greatly needed by those individuals in charge of any successful organization.
Instead of dramatizing the conceptual differences between “management” and “leadership” in the academic- or practitioner-based commentaries (i.e., either/or mentality), the focus should be on the integration of leadership skills in management (both/and mentality). Leadership skills form an important category of must-have skillsets for any manager. It is not imaginable for a good manager to only focus on efficiency or short-term goals while ignoring the purpose or long-term goals of her organization. Therefore, reducing management to efficiency/short-term view/control is not only unfair but misleading. A successful manager must be both efficient and effective. If management is “getting the work done through others,” leadership is an important function of successful management. A successful manager should have leadership skills to inspire and motivate others to achieve organizational goals.
