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Factors Distinguishing the Leader from the Manager

Chapter 7- Leadership

Vecchio, R.P. (2006) Organizationalbehavior: core concepts. 6th Ed. Mason, Ohio:

Thomson-Southwestern

Student: Albert Wolkiewicz

Student ID: 15666106

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Contents

Chapter 1-

Contents.............................................................................................................. 2

Introduction, Aims and Objectives.......................................................................1

Literature Review.................................................................................................3

Methodology........................................................................................................ 9

Interview. .......................................................................................................... 10

Analysis and Findings........................................................................................12

Conclusion......................................................................................................... 13

Reference List………………………………………………………………………………16
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Introduction, Aims and Objectives

Personality differences and behavioural patterns of individuals is an essential part of

people science and, consequently, received a lot of attention in the Human Resource

Management (HRM) research and management quality and efficiency training within the

organizations. Understanding latest trends and drivers behind people behaviour and their

conditioning and roles within the group is an essential knowledge that successful manager

should possess in order to be able to lead and read people in the corporate structure. Already

in 1948 Chester Bernard mentioned that HR science is suffering from extensive amount of

studies dedicated to the leadership and understanding of leadership qualities. The scientists

mention that the topic became so popular as to take some attention from other aspects of

HRM studies (Rosenbach &Taylor, 1998: 5).

What do we mean when we say that the person is a good leader? Or a good manager?

This research document will look at the main distinguishing characteristics of these two

notions and on the way they interrelate and affect each other. One of the most interesting

elements of the research is the differentiation of leadership and managerial actions in one

person. A lot of works try to highlight the importance of leadership in organizational talent

pool, but it is of vital importance to realize that good leadership without management skills is

not better than opposite situation. HRM in large multinational organizations has an objective

to maximize performance management on all levels. Utilizing leadership potential in the

organization in terms of HR management would, therefore, mean being able to develop and

enhance managerial skills in people who have natural talent for leading people.

Each research that analyses the relationships between leadership and management

comes up with own definition and reasoning factors that link those two notions together. The

writer vision of the leadership and management could be summaries in the following
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statement: “Leaders are managing change and managers are leading the complexity of this

change”. With that in mind we strongly believe that one cannot effectively manage change in

the organization unless he or she could take full control over the situation and create common

goal between people with various backgrounds and personalities. One of the major

responsibilities of the manager is to create a team that will not simply work in the same

division but will be united by common objective and interests. To manage such team

manager needs to have leadership potential that will make people listen to him and

management skills to be able to turn his leadership nature into sustainable performance of the

division.

Interpersonal relationships are a vital part of the motivation in the organization.

Employees should have access to the management and it is the responsibility of the direct

management to optimize the interpersonal relationships gap within vertical hierarchy in the

organization. Manager with strong leadership skills will be able to intuitively develop strong

relationships within the team that are built around individual skills, capabilities and personal

qualities.
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Literature Review

Overall work is based and guided by the works of R.Vecchio who wrote a number of

managerial works on the leadership and management analysis that are widely used for

undergraduate and postgraduate education. The author provided this research with in depth

understanding of managerial and leadership techniques and concepts. The book discloses

negative and positive sides of the power and influence in the organization. One of the aspects

that we will be looking at specifically is the decision-making process in the organization and

how leaders and managers come to the conclusions. The author provides interesting and new

perspective on the way the group works together and possible issues and benefits that a good

leader can get out of the team diversity. Conflict and negotiation are the main drivers of the

teamwork and Vecchio provides a deep insight in these elements in his work on

Organizational behaviour (Vecchio, 2006). When looking at the responsibilities and roles of

leader ad manager in the organization we can distinguish the following areas of focus that

will help us to drive conclusions and recommendations for this research documents:

− Diversity management is one of the core elements of building successful and

sustainable leadership model and team as a whole.

− Proactive personality management is the ability of the manager to lead people

and help them to develop personally and professionally based on their talents and

skills

− Emotional intelligence should be developed in the team. In practical terms it

would mean that individuals should be able to effectively communicate with each

other and build the relationships based on mutual respect of views and opinions in the

team. In order to promote that manager should be able to read people and

personalities.
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Leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of

action. Each of them is characterized by its own function and characteristic activities. Both of

these functions however are vital for success especially in constantly growing complex and

volatile business environment. The majority of corporations face with the problem of

management in the form of over-managed and under-led processes. They need to develop

their capacity to exercise leadership. Successful corporations don't wait for leaders to come

along. They actively seek out people with leadership potential and expose them to career

experiences designed to develop that potential. Indeed, with careful selection, nurturing, and

encouragement, dozens of people can play important leadership roles in a business

organization (Rosenbach & Taylor, 1998: 198).

According to Gilley, main roles and responsibilities of the change manager are comprised in

the following aspects:

− Identify the capabilities within the department

− Determine the stress level that each individual under manager’s responsibility

can handle

Any organizational change is a complex process that touches upon and involves

interests of the company as a whole and its individual stakeholders that include management,

regular employees and customers. Effective management of the situations and competencies

therefore, apart from strict logic that is required for the managerial decisions should co-exist

with personalized approach and people management (Gilley 2005: 40). Some of the success

tools that Gilley identifies for leading and managing people is ability to motivate and develop

people’s personal and professional skills. While professional side of employee becomes very

obvious for the manager, in order to understand personality drivers in individual behaviour it
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is important to possess leadership skills that allow manager to better understand and read

personality.

Another aspect that is vital for the good and effective management is motivation and

performance management. Tangible benefits, such as reward and financial benefits are

crucial, but loyalty can only be developed by aligning and creating personal link between

employee and his company. In this respect natural qualities of the managers and his

leadership potential play dominant role. For this reason best HR managers are those who

have psychology background and can combine natural leadership with people management

skills to achieve high return on productivity in terms of human capital performance (Ellis,

2005: 82).

One of the latest trends in the companies’ strategies in regards to company and

division leadership is expressed in the Shared Business Model. The model is trying to find the

balance for the individual management and provide the reader with the modern view on the

leadership and management role within the organizations. The article is based on the

interview and discussion of four CEO from major international corporations. Based on the

summary of the opinions presented in the document there are several major determinants for

the manager to be given more responsibility or to be promoted for the position with bigger

responsibility. Some of them include the potential of the person for growth determined by his

or her previous experience, experience in change management, ability to manage

autonomous, and ability to manage complexity of the organization and understand individual

drivers (Delaney, 2010: 3). Based on these opinions we can find the support for our

arguments and hypothesis on the necessary combination of leadership and manager skills for

successful leader. Delaney shows us that in order to manage the organization the individual

should possess the qualities of change management and learn various personality profiles.
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The document provides the views of four successful business leaders on the business

leadership that can be summarized in the following:

− Leadership talent allows the organization and individuals to share best

practices. Management provides necessary skills to apply them in practice (Lex

Wexner, CEO of Limited Brands Founder).

− Leaders’ role is to show and develop the commitment to the organization.

Manager should bring improvement through the obtained experience. (Pam Patsley,

First Data International, former CEO)

− Leaders are able to understand human nature, human behaviour and human

psychology, while managers can manage the team by a set of skills received through

training and practical experience ( Jerry Jurgenson, CEO of Nationwide).

− Leaderships and management in the organization are strongly connected and it

is important to develop strong company culture and bring everyone in line with this

vision. For that organization should be able to hire people who have both, leadership

and management skills John Bryson, CEO of Edison International).

These views and comments provide us with some insight in the way successful and

effective business leaders see the role of the leadership and management in the organization

and how they, from the CEO’s perspective interlink and co-exist in one business

(autonomous, and ability to manage complexity of the organization and understand individual

drivers (Delaney, 2010: 3).

Both, leaders and the manager should have wide experience in the organization or in

the business in general as this understanding will provide them with the skills and opportunity

to speak the same language with the people they are working with and lead. As much as it is
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important for the manager to understand what it means to be a good leader, sometimes these

two notions can contradict with each other. Looking at the process of communication in the

group from the perspective of personality differences we can identify the following core

factors that may depict leader and manager and aspects in which they can conflict with each

other. First of all , management should and normally is logic driven and all the decisions that

are made by the “manager side” of the person will be based on arguments and logic supported

by pure facts. On the other hand it is important to understand that “leadership side” will

always base decisions guided by personalities and emotional side of the decision. In the

majority of cases good manager will find a healthy balance in the ratio of emotional and

logical conditioning of the decisions. When manager has definite overweight of “thinking” or

“feeling” side in his or her personality it is very likely that it will create conflict in the

decision-making process.

Working with people is to some extent being able to joggling different opinion s and

bringing it to the achievement of the common goal. In this case the roles of leader and

manager are very different. While manager is given the authority artificially and has rights

over the way he or she is utilizing the resources under her management to achieve the

objectives of department (team), leader’s role is to manage personality side of the decisions

that will help to support manager’s reputation in the team and create general satisfaction with

the roles slit in the group. It is not a secret that the ability to delegate the responsibilities does

not guarantee the best utilization of the resources and productivity in the group. In order to

maximize these indicators it is crucial to create intangible motivation and incentives. For this,

leadership role is crucial to supplement management decision.

Another view expresses on the differences between leaders and managers looks at

these role as the “wisdom” and “talent”. From strategic perspective, leaders in the

organization have much higher responsibility level and have to be able to see the business
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and main objectives from the perspective of the long term strategic development. For that,

according to the Warren Bennis, have to determine the underlining forces and drivers in the

organization and in the market to link it together in the strategic vision of the organization.

Managers’ role, however, is relatively more operational and as a manager, individual should

be responsible for optimization of the processes in the organization and immediate effective

performance (Bennis & Goldsmith, 2003: 23). In other words, leaders are usually seen as

those who are testing the hypothesis and try to comprise the information on different

organizational levels to transform it in united mechanism or production mechanism called

firm.

Some of the HRM studies trying to analyse the ways that would be most suitable for

development leadership potential in the organizations offer an escalating skills adaptation

model that looks at the individual development in the organization through the transformation

of natural talent to natural leaders to the effective business leaders with strong managerial

skills. The Model of leadership pipeline offers the following order in the career and personal

development ladder:

Leading self: it is the junior level of personal development that is focused on making

an individual with leading potential to understand his or her limits and talents and start

developing them by leading self in a right and most appropriate way.

Leading Others: second level, generally described as supervisor level and focuses on

developing basic people management skills in the individual. On this level person learns

basic management skills and decision-making based on the logical reasoning. At this stage it

is important to combine leadership skills and motivate people with intangible incentive as

well as learn how to deal with different personality types.

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Leading Leaders: Leading leader is senior level in the organizational hierarchy. It

should combine equally proportional leadership and management qualities.

Leading and Enterprise: last stage of the leadership development, generally presented

by CEOs. After acquiring all the knowledge through climbing the leadership pipeline at this

stage, assuming that the person gained all the management knowledge, he or she can become

effective leader of the organization with understanding of all the major processes.

As we are looking at the factors, distinguishing leaders and managers in the

organizational roles we came across various opinions, theories and definitions. In order to

come up with the more definite conclusions and add additional value with this study by

supporting the study with more practical experience that could be obtained through

interviews and discussions with current business leaders.

Methodology

The purpose of this document is to examine and analyse in details existing hypothesis

and views on the distinguishing factors of leaders and managers in business environment. Our

primary research questions require some insight in the latest trends and development of the

elements that build up leadership and management pipeline in the organization.

The scope of our analysis will be limited by the understanding and interpreting of the

leadership and management distinguishing factor from company’s perspective. Main

objective of this research is to identify the characteristics of successful leader in the

organization that comprises the qualities of natural leader and skills of the manager. Based on

the literature review done for this study as well as the result of the interview with the CEO of

the organization we will be able to draw the conclusions and answer our primary research

question: “What are the factors distinguishing leader and manager?”.

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One of the information collection methods used for this study and that was used as a

major source of data and reasoning for conclusions is the interview with Steve Richards,

former CEO of the company FTD Interflora, and leading provider of floral services in the UK

through web, telesales and retail. During the interview we have asked Steve several questions

that helped us to develop our analysis on the main factors distinguishing leader and manager.

Interflora is a large company with extensive in-house production processes and great variety

of cultural and professional background specialist working in different divisions. The choice

of the company and the person for this interview was determined by visible success and

unusual nature of the business organization in involved in. One of the findings of our research

is the growing need and attention for the empathy management and in the floristic business

this element in business and corporate structure is extremely important. We believe that

empathy is one of the factors that distinguishing leader from the manager and, in order to test

this hypothesis, we have chosen to interview Steve Richards.

Interview.

For the purpose of this study it was decided to apply interview research method and

focused our question specifically around leadership and motivation.

1. What determined a good manager? Good Leader?

“In simple words, I believe that good managers are generally good leaders as one

supplements another. You can be born with leadership talent, but in order to apply it and get

the best out of you need to learn basic management technique. At the same time, manager

that does not understand people cannot manage the team effectively”.

2. What are three main distinguishing characteristics of business leader and

manager?
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“Manager manages resources and leader brings innovative ideas and manages

emotional aspects. Manager solves immediate problems by controlling and implementing

structure and leader develops long term relationships between people and structures. Manager

is result oriented and leader has conceptual vision”.

3. From your personal experience, what are the most effective motivational tools

for the employees?

“All the employees should be financially rewarded for the job they are doing. This is

the qualifier that is offered by all the organizations without exception. What makes

employees to stay with the company and put all the efforts in the job they are doing is

corporate culture. Corporate culture is something that can make a difference and significantly

influence employees’ motivation”.

4. Do you think empathy is an important element of employment relationships?

“Empathy is rather a part of the corporate culture. Organization, even the most

complex and large should treat people as one of their most valuable asset. Only with this

approach we can work as a team”.

5. What can prevent good manager from building relationships in a team?

“I think the secret of good management is in the right set of leadership and managerial

skills. It is important that manager can differentiate and control them and avoid conflict

situation and radical decision. Leadership is the talent to understand different views,

approaches and mindsets and this ability makes manager see the situation from different

angles – something you cannot learn during training sessions”.

6. What are main success criteria of the team work?

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“Team is a group of people that work together to achieve common objective. If you

succeed to make different people in various teams in the company to work as a unite

mechanism, you will be able to reach high productivity in the organization”.

Analysis and Findings

Based on the analysis of the literature review and interview with the CEO of the

Interflora corporation received relatively complete picture of how different scientist and

business people see the role of the business leaders and managers in modern organizations.

One of the “common denominators” in our analysis is the opinion that leadership are people

oriented and tend to be more conceptual, while managers, in contrary, more resource-driven

and tend to make decisions based on the logical reasoning.

Another important finding is that leadership and management are very interdependent.

Being a leader does not necessarily mean being a manager. While management skills can be

obtained through experience and theoretical application of the received knowledge,

leadership potential is a natural talent that people either have or not.

The relationship between management is leadership is similar to the efficiency and

effectiveness distinguishing. Management is doing things in a right way and leadership

means doing right things. Management makes current processes work and leader creates new

processes.

One of the main distinguishing characteristics of leader and manager is their intuition

and plan driven decisions. Organizational behaviour very much repeats this trend as it is

determined by the activities, attitudes and feelings of the managers that drive the business.

Leadership is exceptionally important quality for managers within Human Resource

Management whose main objective is the performance and productivity of the organization
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through people management. To understand people it is not enough to have leadership

potential, as it will not equip your management experience with the tools of dealing and

addressing the issues that have been determined. Management, therefore, can be considered

as a substitute set of skills that are required to turn leadership, as a raw material, into effective

organization driver.

According to S.Richards, leadership is a core motivation creator in the organization

and while financial compensation is important, it only generates competitiveness of the

organization on the labour market, but does not differentiate the company from the variety of

its competitors. By combining leader and manager in one person, business leader will be able

to find a healthy balance between emotional and operational management that in turn will

create win-win situation for the employee and employer.

Based on the escalation ladder that was described in previous section of the document,

we can assume that with the growth of professional experience leadership and management

skills start to become more and more interrelated and dependable on each other. In the same

way organizational leaders will be able to see real management potential in the junior

managers.

Conclusion

Leadership and management development contributes directly to improving

performance and productivity of the organization and creates company’s value proposition.

What makes a good leader or manager, and how can these qualities be assessed, developed

and nurtured?

We believe that it is impossible to come up with the list that will fully cover all the

aspects of business leadership and provide complete overview of the main leadership and

management distinguishing factors. The research, however, gave us conceptual understanding

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of the drivers that influence organizational behaviour and directly impact company’s success

on the market. It is also important to understand that global economy and business

environment determine the direction in which leadership and management skills and

requirements will evolve. Modern business leaders should possess much wider range of

knowledge than business managers fifty years ago. It is mainly determined by growing

complexity and scale of the activities individual companies are involved in. One of the

biggest values of these studies is to understand latest requirements for the skills that effective

and successful business leader should possess. In spite of the numerous works and researches

that have been done on the leadership and management and their main distinguishing

qualities, this subject is, probably, the most uncertain and dynamic due to the constantly

changing business environment.

Very often when we learn about the leadership concepts we have an impression that

leadership is something that is almost impossible to achieve. One way to target and achieve

effective management is to understand that there is no single truth about the concept of both,

leadership and management. Both of them are very flexible and adoptable to the needs of the

organization and expectations of individuals working for this company.

It is not a secret that business world is almost flooded with various leadership

programs and trainings for different management levels that promise to make you a

successful business leader in one or several weeks of intensive training? Whether it is

possible or not still remains very controversial. For people with strong people skills and

leadership potential these programs will, most probably, more effective than for those who do

not possess basic human management skills (Ford, Harding & Learmounth , 2008: 167).

During this analysis we have read and analyse a number of opinions of the people

who know about business leadership from first hands, such as companies’ CEOs and senior
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directors that have departments, divisions and enterprises under their direct responsibility and

can definitely provide deep insight in the modern concept of business leader. Even with this

information and wide experience based on personal learning practise, opinions of these

people vary a lot and often provide contradictive view on the specific aspects and factors that

distinguish leadership and management. All of them, however, agree on the aspect that these

two notions are strongly dependent on each other and in order to be able to get the most out

of the environment and the team you are working on it is important to possess both set of

skills. What makes real manager and determines his main responsibility in the team is the

ability to gather together all the skills within the team and make them work for the benefit of

the organization. While different people possess different skills, it is only up to the manager

and leader, for this matter, to puzzle these capabilities together to create unique competitive

advantage on labour as well as customer market.

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References:

Bennis, W. & Goldsmith, J. (2003) Learning to lead , 3rd ed. New York: Basic Books.

Dalton, K. (2010) Leadership and management development: developing tomorrow's

managers, 1st ed. London: Financial Times / Prentice Hall.

Delaney, S. (2010) CEO round table: improving performance through a shared business

model [Online] Available from:

http://www.chiefexecutive.net/sc/leadership/sponsor_articles/sharedbusinessmodel_US.p

df (Accessed: 14 October 2010).

Ellis, W.C. (2005) Management skills for new managers, 2nd ed. New York: Amacom.

Ford, J. Harding, N. , & Learmounth, M. (2008) Leadership as identity: constructions

and disconstructions ,1st ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.

FTD Interflora (2010). Available from: http://www.interflora.co.uk (Accessed: 12 October

2010)

Gilley, A. (2005) The manager as change leader, 2nd ed. Westport, CT: Praeger

Rosenbach, W.E. & Taylor, L.R. (1998) Contemporary issues in leadership, 1st ed.

Boulder : Westview Press.

Vecchio, R.P. (2006) Organizational behaviour: core concepts, 6th ed. Mason, OH:

Thompson South- Western.

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Vecchio,R.P (2007) Leadership: understanding the dynamics of power and influence in

organizations, 2nd ed. London: University Of Notre Dame Press.