Managers and Leaders

In every organisation, managing people in different hierarchy is as important a task as any other business attributes namely technology, finance & market. Every individual needs to be assigned a task, the applicable rules & regulations need to be defined, their performance need to be monitored and suitable actions are required to be initiated based on their output & results.

In the bottommost of this hierarchy are the individual contributors (IC) who are supervised by a manager mainly responsible for ensuring the quality & quantity of the output and safety & wellbeing of a group of these ICs. More managers need to be deployed depending on the scale of operation &/or diversity of operations.

While it is important to successfully run & control the day to day operations, it is equally important to constantly devise innovative ways to strengthen the organisation & the present position, foresee & analyse opportunities and focus on future direction to be adopted in order to build a sustainable & profitably growing business.

An organisation therefore, needs people who can efficiently & effectively control & manage various day to day tasks (The Manager/s) as well as those who lead the path (The Leader/s) to create new approaches , imagine new areas to explore and put ideas to work. One feature commonly associated with leaders is influence while with managers, it is adherence & compliance. Managers promote stability while leaders press for change.

Every organisation needs the differing skill sets of both, the Managers as well as the Leaders. Both are entrusted with employees whom they must work with to realise organisational objectives. However, for reasons of operational scale, hierarchical complexities & management control, it may not be feasible to separate these two roles and therefore, good managers have to be good leaders and vice versa. Organizations may not afford to have leaders who cannot manage and managers who cannot lead.