The difference between management and leadership lies in the literal meaning of the words they come from — ‘manage’ and ‘lead’. To manage means to take control of a situation — a manager directs people to do the work in a very rigid way. In other words, a typical manager sticks to the norms and expects other to do so as well. On the other hand, to lead means to guide — a leader is also required to take control over situations, but he is understanding and sympathetic towards the workers as well. Hence, leader seems more friendly a word, than manager. However, even though we can segregate the two words in terms of their meaning, the line separating the two terms is very thin. Manager is a term coined to denote a person in authority — this authoritative person may understand the value of a good leader and therefore be an ideal leader as well. Therefore, one person can be both manager and leader. Nevertheless, owing to the line of thought from which they both originate, there are different in many ways.
Difference Between A Manager And A Leader
Focus
A manager tries to maintain a given work pattern and tries to keep things under control. He/she likes to keep things the way they are and attempts to bring stability to the work place, which is why a typical manager does not like conflicts and most of the time tries to play it safe. On the other hand, a leader is at a constant attempt to change things for the better, looking for loopholes in the system and fixing them.
Style Of Work
For a manager, work is like a deal — an input generates an output, whereby work becomes mechanical and rigid. Whereas, a leader’s style of work leans more towards transforming the work experience into something better than before.
Eventual Expectation
The manager wants the team to have results at the end of the day — leader wants to achieve. If you are a reporter, your manager would want you to complete the story by the end of the day—but if your manager were a leader, he would want you to get a good story by the end of the day and might even allow you to use more than the given time to do and achieve better.
Vision
A leader is a visionary whereas a manager is a taskmaster. Under a leadership, each step will be towards trying to break new grounds and reach new goals. Under a management, you will be working on existing norms that are already tried and tested.
Comfort Zone
A manager will never step out of his comfort zone to do anything. A leader, on the other hand, will always be at his foot to do a novel thing, even if it means stepping out of his comfort zone. A leader mostly does not have a comfort zone and if he/she has one, he/she prefers to live out of it.
Response
The response of the people working under a manager and a leader is naturally different. People trust their leaders and would follow him/her blindly. Whereas, a manager will only have people follow him because of the fear of losing their jobs. People trust their leader’s word and advice but for manager they only have fear of unemployment.
The above statements reveal a stark difference between a leader and manager — making the manager look like a villain and the leader, a hero. Speaking of which, have you ever heard of a good cop-bad cop strategy? A manager and leader can work together, in fact they should. By this collaboration, the production rate and range can increase to a much better scale. Although innovation is good, a sense of security is also necessary. A leader can work out new strategies to work, and a manager can look after these strategies and implement them.
