Sunday, March 10, 2013

Manager Vs Leader



 "Managers are people who do things right; 
Leaders are the people who do the right things."


Speaking about Leadership is a very general thing in the concurrent working world. Some organizations talk about encouraging a leader in every single team member. However, implementing this thought is really a complex effort. This is not like participating in a technical training where once training is complete,  people will start working.

Developing a Leader involves looking things with various prospective – it’s like changing the very thought process of a personality. You are with me or not but it’s a process for encouraging people to see the things from end-to-end and to foresee them too. I’m not sure how many of organizations would like to do that. Once a thought process is set – maintaining a consistency across the organization will be another difficult task. It means that no matter which level of leadership the customer is interacting with, he would have same customer centric experience.

Being just a manager means accepting the status as it is while being a leader means challenging the status and looking more into the horizon. It depends more on how strategic leadership provides an environment, where a manager is just not supposed to look at 30 degree but at least 180 degree. 

Some people say “Leaders create the vision and show the direction. Managers implement and motivate.” Accordingly amid both (Leadership and Managership) inter-dependability is so much that in order to be successful one team must provide with an environment where both things overlap each other to a great extent.

Most of the organizations seem to separate both (Leadership and Managership). But should a manager not be a leader? I think that if you are a manager and all you do is follow what everybody tells you to do really you are not worth much as a manager? Let’s see this thing with this perspective – Adopt a strategic vision in a best possible way and deliver it to the best in your own way, with a personalized touch. It’s like 5 sales persons interacted with a customer at different times and customer experienced was consistent with a personal touch of every sales person.


 Despite the fact that managers are nominated and supported by the top, while leaders are recognized and supported by followers; creating an overlapping area for Leadership and Managership can create a hotbed for fast smooth growth – a growth with a difference.  Not to say separately that good leaders use inspiration and rationale to keep their followers while bad ones use coercion and/or mind manipulation.

2 comments:

  1. "Managers are nominated and supported by the top, while leaders are recognized and supported by followers" Well Said Piyush.. I must agree with Sumant it is a well written article indeed. I would like to add a single sentence that it is a well thought and analyzed Article.. I wish you would 'lead' such wonderful thoughts and bring them here for us... cheers!!!

    -Avadhut Joshi

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  2. Very nice article!!

    I personally liked that line:

    "Manager means accepting the status as it is while being a leader means challenging the status and looking more into the horizon"

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