Discussion on:

Achieving executive balance: Nine ways leaders and managers work together

Do you agree with this view of the relationship between leadership and management roles within an organization? Have you ever worked in an environment that lacked one or the other?

For the longest time, and more often in the past 2 years, I have always considered a leader more valuable than a manager. In fact, I have often held leaders to manager roles and managers to leader roles. Looking at this article, not only is this an uninformed point of view, it is also an unfair one. I'm not sure others will agree but for me this article made this point.

If you look to the end of the article, it comments that success requires both leadership and management.

I couldn't agree more completely.

Yet the article also implies that a single individual could only be either one or the other. Being a person who teaches leadership for IT project recovery, it's been my own personal experience that leadership without management will fail, and management without leadership will also fail. It is far better to be a person with both qualities, knowing when and where to lead, and how to manage the measurements through the process.

Lynn Watkins, PMP
www.projectrecoverypro.com

There is a great deal of literature out there about this issue. In fact, my doctoral research pertains to leadership and management within IT and leaders/management working together to acheive project success.

It is possible for leaders to be managers, but it is not necessarily possible for managers to be leaders. This is the bases of the literature. However, can we really define the roles of both? There is a lot of overlap. Some say that it is about doing the right thing versus doing something right.

The point is, people can learn management skills, I don't believe people can learn to be leaders. They can learn what the skills are, but if they don't have the ability to be leaders, the training doesn't work effectively.

Could they be the same person? It sometimes seems obvious that a leader is a manager. Remember Management 101 (Plan, Organize, Lead, Control)? But I do agree with the author - leadership is more of a personality trait than management is.

Leaders possess courage; managers need to be encouraged.

Leaders have charisma; managers have enthusiasm.

thought so and worked towards the same. In the course of ones career path a professional gradually works thru stages of performing hands on and than towards improvement upgradation and vision for a certain term thereby growing from manager to a leader.

the article makes leadership look like a function that dreams up utopia without supporting it with actual current analysis, laying of roadmaps to achieve goals and actually doing what is needed to reach their vision.

Brilliant piece. Echos what I have been saying about the balance and synergy between Leadership and Management for years - http://brucelynnblog.spaces.live.com. Many complementarities, but my favourite is 'Leaders optimise upside, Managers minimise downside.'