I started university again this week. Yes, I did. As busy as I am at work, or perhaps at work and in my free time as I am a bit of a workaholic, I have this innate need to always learn and grow. And because I am driven to succeed in my career, I felt it was important to start preparing for the next step – and so I began a part-time Professional Diploma in Management at the Dublin Business School.
On Wednesday, I had my first lecture, which I thought was a great start. We delved into leadership and particularly the differences between leadership and management.
It was an inspiring evening of learning and reflection for me that got me writing this blog post and creating the infographic on the differences between a leader and a manager below.
The key learning really is that leadership and management are fundamentally different, but they often need to go hand in hand.
Warren Bennis distinguishes both explaining that “To manage means to bring about, to accomplish, to have charge of or responsibility for, to conduct. Leading is influencing, guiding in a direction, course, action, opinion.” He also says that both are important.
Sometimes you might lean towards leadership more, in other situations following management principles might be the better solution.
Some people are innate leaders, who need to acquire and perfect their management skills; others are natural managers but need to work more on their leadership abilities.
One thing that we’ve been seeing over the past years is that leadership is becoming a lot more important in business. Why? Because soft skills and empathy that are at the centre of leadership are harder to develop than hard skills which are key in management to get the job done and bring order. Another very important reason is that our society is strongly moving away from the old principles of where a business is just a profit-making machine and employees are simply the robots with no say behind it. Not only as consumers but as workers we’ve become more sophisticated and demanding, more opinionated and strong-willed.
If you want to be an inspiring leader, there are some crucial capabilities you need to have:
One of the things that really stuck in my mind was how our lecturer defined leadership:
Leadership is a way for a company to make more profit through its people by motivating them and creating a happy work environment.
Leaders and managers are there to make people's lives better in order to make more profit for the business – the happier the staff, the more motivated they are and so the more business they bring on. Often businesses forget the happiness and the motivation part and just put the processes front and centre. There’s no sustainable return on this. However, no big idea can become reality without execution. Leadership and management are both necessary and complementary.
Summing it up, here are the five key things that Jack Welch – one of the biggest names in business – advises leaders and managers to do in his book The Real-Life MBA (next on my reading list together with Warren Bennis’s book):
Leader or manager, whoever you aspire to be, what matters most is that you are always you.
Click here for larger view on Visual.ly