Management and Leadership Paper

Management and Leadership Paper

Within the organizational structure of most businesses you will likely find management and leadership coexisting. Commonly, the words are often substituted for on another. However, each word has a distinctly different definition. A manager does not necessarily make a good manager. Management is defined as those individuals in an organization that have the authority and the responsibility to manage the organization through the control of production processes and ensuring that they operate efficiently and effectively. Leadership is defined as the skills and ability to set future goals in accordance with the organizational goals and to communicate those goals to other employees in such a way that they voluntarily and harmoniously work together to accomplish those goals for the benefit of the organization. In this paper I will differentiate between management and leadership?

Any organization needs to be managed, even a one-person company has to be managed. A manager has four key responsibilities: 1) planning, 2) organizing, 3) leading, and 4) controlling. Management can also be defined as the function that determines how the organization’s human, financial, physical, informational, and technical resources are arranged and coordinated to perform tasks towards achievement of strategic goals.

Leadership implies that the manager has fundamental knowledge about critical processes. A leader is focused on ensuring the creation of strategies, systems, and methods for achieving excellence and building knowledge and capabilities. Leaders are focused more on creating an enthusiastic work environment for all of a company’s employees. In other words leadership is to help people do a better job through coaching, facilitating, and by creating environments that support the aim of the organization. Leadership is the ability of a manager to train employees, remove institutional roadblocks, and empower employees. (Stern and Kren, 2002).

The common thread in differentiating between management and leadership seems to be that management is more involved with monitoring the details of the daily operations and leadership is about invoking the changes necessary to continuously move towards an organization’s vision. I have also found that in all of the success stories read, the common points are that the leaders took a different approach into the organization with the mission of gaining insightful and critical knowledge about their customer base and the challenges faced by the employees.

In one example, I have helped to create a healthy organizational structure by following the same approach that Andrea Jung of Avon had taken. That approach was based on a mental image of a future possible state of the organization, or in this case department. Despite previous management’s lack of vision, by investigating into the different positions within my team and listening to employees feedback, I was able to implement process changes that resulted in a 30% decrease in work duplication, a 30% decrease in product cycle times, and an increase in productivity by 40%. Besides the obvious measurable results of the process changes, it created better employee behavior and a more motivated workforce. A democratic leadership style allows the employees to be a part of the decision making process and to accept uncertainty, because they have confidence that the leader will provide solutions to any problems that may arise. In my opinion, the worst thing a leader can do is to make no decision when faced with a difficult decision try something new or to leave things in their current condition. An attempt to at least try something new lends to a leader’s credibility. Since these changes tool affect, I am getting more feedback from my employees than ever before.

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