Leader vs Manager

I was reading John Maxwells book ‘Developing the leader within you’ recently and couldn’t help pondering over the immaturity used in defining leadership. This is also followed in many books and by other authors while defining leadership. John says that Manager gets the job done while the leader inspires others to do a better job. I don’t understand why people take pleasure in beating the manager and glorifying the leader. Why a leader has to be defined by comparing to a manager. Most of the definitions of leadership also imply that a bad leader is a manager, some moron who only gets work done but doesn’t inspire the followers to do better work.

A manager is not actually a bad leader. He/she is generally defined within the context of a particular unit of work or service, like a project manager or a program manager. What it essentially means is that a manager is responsible for the work unit as a whole which includes both human and non human entities like infrastructure, machinery, assets, costs, budgets etc. All these entities need to be managed to deliver the work unit especially the non human ones, they cannot be led. However managing some or all of these entities finally requires leading people. Leadership is an enabler to management. In that context leadership is also superior to management since good management requires good leadership but the reverse is not true. Thus leadership drives management of resources and people to achieve the final goal. A leader and a manager have two separate but overlapping functions and the statement that a manager is a bad leader or some such sort doesn’t really hold water.

Most real life problem solving calls for situational leadership ie leadership styles that change with the context and time. So its not always practical to follow the inspirational form of leadership (which is the pinnacle of leadership as defined by Maxwell). The goal or the end of any organization is not to inspire people per se but to make profits. Inspiring people is just a very important and high priority means towards achieving that goal. A leader plays a huge role in getting the work done from people and needs to use different forms of leadership which meets the final end. In some situations he needs to use inspirational leadership while in others authoritative, but making him/herself clear. While in a leadership position your goal can’t be to make everybody happy. Your strategies and actions have to be to meet the goals of the organization.