The Idea in Brief
The most pernicious half-truth about leadership is that it’s just a matter of charisma and vision—you either have it or you don’t. The fact of the matter is that leadership skills are not innate. They can be acquired, and honed. But first you have to appreciate how they differ from management skills.
Management is about coping with complexity; it brings order and predictability to a situation. But that’s no longer enough—to succeed, companies must be able to adapt to change. Leadership, then, is about learning how to cope with rapid change.
How does this distinction play out?
- Management involves planning and budgeting. Leadership involves setting direction.
- Management involves organizing and staffing. Leadership involves aligning people.
- Management provides control and solves problems. Leadership provides motivation.
The Idea in Practice
Management and leadership both involve deciding what needs to be done, creating networks of people to accomplish the agenda, and ensuring that the work actually gets done. Their work is complementary, but each system of action goes about the tasks in different ways.
1. Planning and budgeting versus setting direction. The aim of management is predictability—orderly results. Leadership’s function is to produce change. Setting the direction of that change, therefore, is essential work. There’s nothing mystical about this work, but it is more inductive than planning and budgeting. It involves the search for patterns and relationships. And it doesn’t produce detailed plans; instead, direction-setting results in visions and the overarching strategies for realizing them. Example:
In mature industries, increased competition usually dampens growth. But at American Express, Lou Gerstner bucked this trend, successfully crafting a vision of a dynamic enterprise.
The new direction he set wasn’t a mere attention-grabbing scheme—it was the result of asking fundamental questions about market and competitive forces.
2. Organizing and staffing versus aligning people. Managers look for the right fit between people and jobs. This is essentially a design problem: setting up systems to ensure that plans are implemented precisely and efficiently. Leaders, however, look for the right fit between people and the vision. This is more of a communication problem. It involves getting a large number of people, inside and outside the company, first to believe in an alternative future—and then to take initiative based on that shared vision.
3. Controlling activities and solving problems versus motivating and inspiring. Management strives to make it easy for people to complete routine jobs day after day. But since high energy is essential to overcoming the barriers to change, leaders attempt to touch people at their deepest levels—by stirring in them a sense of belonging, idealism, and self-esteem. Example:
At Procter & Gamble’s paper products division, Richard Nicolosi underscored the message that “each of us is a leader” by pushing responsibility down to newly formed teams. An entrepreneurial attitude took root, and profits rebounded.
The article reprinted here stands on its own, of course, but it can also be seen as a crucial contribution to a debate that began in 1977, when Harvard Business School professor Abraham Zaleznik published an HBR article with the deceptively mild title “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” The piece caused an uproar in business schools. It argued that the theoreticians of scientific management, with their organizational diagrams and time-and-motion studies, were missing half the picture—the half filled with inspiration, vision, and the full spectrum of human drives and desires. The study of leadership hasn’t been the same since.
“What Leaders Really Do,” first published in 1990, deepens and extends the insights of the 1977 article. Introducing one of those brand-new ideas that seems obvious once it’s expressed, retired Harvard Business School professor John Kotter proposes that management and leadership are different but complementary, and that in a changing world, one cannot function without the other. He then enumerates and contrasts the primary tasks of the manager and the leader. His key point bears repeating: Managers promote stability while leaders press for change, and only organizations that embrace both sides of that contradiction can thrive in turbulent times.
Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think. Leadership isn’t mystical and mysterious. It has nothing to do with having “charisma” or other exotic personality traits. It is not the province of a chosen few. Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it.
A version of this article appeared in the December 2001 issue of Harvard Business Review.