Management and Leadership - What's the difference?

Are there any meaningful differences between management and leadership, or is it just a matter of semantics? I have seen many leading scholars debate this issue over the years, but the best articulation of the difference I have seen comes from John Kotter*, who used to be Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School. According to Kotter, “management is about coping with complexity,” whereas leadership is “about coping with change.” He went on to further differentiate the two roles in several dimensions.

The differences are summarized in the table below:

Management	Leadership
Planning and Budgeting	Setting a Direction or Vision
Organizing and Staffing	Aligning People
Controlling and Problem Solving	Motivating People

Here is my take on this issue. In my view, leaders emphasize 3 e’s more than managers: engagement, empowerment, and enablement. In other words, leaders try to engage their followers in a new direction that the organization needs to move onto, empower them to make things happen, and enable or support them to make their work possible. Whereas management tends to establish measurable goals, monitor to ensure work is being accomplished, and make corrections if the work deviates from planning. I often hear people protest that we need management, and I fully agree that we need both leaders and managers. Unfortunately, my experience in working with many organizations in the past or at looking over the studies my colleagues have conducted over the years, the situation is rather bleak in that we have too much management and not enough leadership. Stay tuned for how we plan to change or ameliorate the situation at Nazareth’s SBL.

- Dr. Kenneth S. Rhee, Dean, School of Business and Leadership

* Kotter, J. P. (1999). John P. Kotter on what leaders really do. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.