Leadership is the activity of influencing a certain group of people to work together towards achievement of common goal. Management on the other hand is the activity of dealing or controlling people to perform certain duties. In order to become a good leader, an individual should be able to manage a group of people so as to enhance the aspect of influencing them. Both leadership and management are essential for the success of an organization. Leadership and management have to be strong in the sense that combining both the characteristics and the functions will enable an organization to experience high performance. In this case we are going to compare and contrast the functions of both so as to better understand which function is more important (Quinn & Quinn , 2016).
The distinction between management and leadership lie on the fact that things can be managed while people are lead. A manager will perform the functions of planning, organizing, controlling, staffing and coordinating. These activities involve managing assets, setting up strategies and overseeing the processes. In order for all the things to take place, people are part and parcel of these processes, this is where leadership comes in, and it is where the leaders will influence these people to work on the process, work on the assets, set strategies and implement these strategies. People in this case will include customers, employees, stakeholders and the external or internal partners in the organization. When we talk of leadership, we talk of people, we talk of way of being and in this case, it is the way of influencing them through leadership.
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Management and leadership are two distinct aspects such that they cannot be compared; management deals with facts while leadership deals with people. In managerial aspect the company will focus on achieving goals through planning and setting strategies to be implemented while on the other hand, the leader will ensure that he has influenced people to achieve the set objectives. An organization with poor leadership is an organization that has no direction, this is because an organization cost of vision and mission, and therefore the leadership process will ensure that the vision and mission are communicated to the team. Where there is poor leadership, the team will not be well conversant with the vision and mission of that organization and this will result to poor performance. Employees need a leader who will understand and communicate to them in more influential manner. In most cases, managers’ use command while communicating, this also distinguishes the leader and the manager.
Taking a look at the performance triangle of any organization, we find that leadership forms the basis of the triangle, where management and technology lies on the side. This is a clear indication that leadership forms the basis of any successful organization, in the sense that people are the most important aspect in any organization. For the goals to be achieved implementation process should take place, also for the aspects of understanding to take place, a leader should be able to communicate clear vision and mission to the people. People are the reason as why business exists, organizations will need customers, stakeholders and employees, and therefore the purpose of a leader is to influence all the people towards realization of the organization goals. Both management and leadership are needed in an organization, however, when it comes to dealing with people, leadership will take the high role because it involves a one on one with the same people who will work towards realization of these goals. Motivation, persuasion, commitment and the feeling of people cannot be achieved through commanding, hence leadership is important than management (Solomon, Costea & Nita 2016).
Reference
Quinn, R. W., & Quinn, R. E. (2016). Change Management and Leadership Development Have to Mesh. Harvard Business Review.[Online][Accessed on 8 October 2016] https://hbr. org/2016/01/change-management-and-leadership-development-have-to-mesh .
Solomon, I. G., Costea, C., & Nita, A. M. (2016). Leadership versus management in public organizations. Economics, Management and Financial Markets , 11 (1), 143.
