Leader Or Manager – Who Makes The Difference?
- May 29, 2023
- 3 min read
Written by: Luca Berni, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Leadership development has always been one of the most frequently discussed topics in organizational training courses. Dozens of people follow paths to become effective leaders, capable of guiding their team, group, or the entire organization towards the goals set. But is there really a need for all these “leaders”? Or are we confusing leadership with managerial skills?
To answer this question, we should first establish what the difference between a Leader and a Manager is.
For years I've been looking for an effective way to distinguish the two figures, but of all the definitions, metaphors, or images I've found, Stephen Covey's one seems to be the most effective to me. Covey defines the two roles in this way: “If we find ourselves in the middle of the forest, the Leader is the one who climbs to the top of the tallest tree, scans the horizon and indicates the direction and the point of arrival, while the manager is the one who, having received this information, puts himself at the head of the group and makes his way through the bush to ensure that everyone arrives at the destination safe and sound."
From this point of view, a Leader is someone that has a vision, and who sees in the future what others do not. The Manager is the one who transforms this vision into results.
Of course, the two figures can be present in the same person, but an organization needs very few leaders (even just one), while it needs more people to make things happen. People who transform a vision into reality. People capable of putting themselves at the head of a group and guiding them through adversity, until results are achieved.
Teaching Leadership, in the sense of being a visionary, is very difficult, because it depends on personal variables. Furthermore, the ability to see the future can be strongly linked to a specific field. For example, you may be a "visionary" in the IT sector but have no idea about the future of agriculture.
Managerial skills, on the other hand, are cross and can be expressed independently of the sector. These skills are more concrete and more suitable to be learned through personal development paths.
Communication, management, motivation, setting goals, designing, and implementing action plans, which are some of the most recurring themes in Leadership development paths, are actually managerial skills and can be effectively taught.
But why then do we always talk about Leadership development programs and rarely about managerial development programs? The reason is quite simple: becoming a Leader is much more "attractive" than becoming a Manager. Yet, the figure of the Manager is much more important than that of the Leader. I understand that this goes against common sense, but an organization can survive without a Leader, at least in the medium term, but it cannot live without a Manager.
Despite this, becoming a leader evokes in people a feeling of affirmation, power, admiration, and authority. The positive image that the word "Leader" evokes is so strong that even the image of those famous people who are cited as examples of great Leaders benefits from it, creating a myth around the person, which sometimes goes far beyond their real qualities.
On the other hand, being a Manager evokes in the collective imagination the "simple" implementation of the ideas of others, debasing a role that, on the contrary, is of vital importance. Furthermore, the way we have introduced the figures of Leader and Manager, being a Manager means facing the most difficult challenges on a daily basis, starting with the difficulties in managing people. Being a Manager means being constantly at the centre of the action, having very narrow margins of error and constantly bearing the weight of responsibilities and expectations. This puts people's resistance and resilience to the test, much more than those who are called to "imagine" the future.
You don't make a difference by having good ideas but by making them come true.
Luca Berni, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Luca Berni is an Executive & Team Coach that works with Leaders, Top Managers, Entrepreneurs, Boards of Directors, and Leadership Teams. Before becoming a Coach in 2009, he worked as a Manager in different Multinational companies in different Countries for almost twenty years. Luca also works as a management consultant, he co-founded and runs TheNCS The Neuroscience Coaching School, and he writes articles and books about Coaching and Management.
