What is the difference between leadership and management?

Leadership and management are cousins, not twins. It can be easy to confuse the two, especially for those who find themselves in the thick of day-to-day needs of planning, reacting and responding, and developing people and organisations. Understanding what makes them different is key to being able to equip your team and being equipped yourself.

What is leadership?

Acas defines a leader as meaning “being more than someone who manages people.” Someone who’s focus and thinking goes beyond operational to do lists; leaders think proactively and strategically, communicate efficiently, invest in and inspire those around them.

Leadership is both a role and a behaviour. It requires the skill to ask complex questions and seeks to move things forward for both the leader and the led. Leaders develop their own style, leaning into their authentic strengths and being honest about their weaknesses; they are continually growing, open to gleaning learning from anywhere they can.

A quick search for books on leadership generates around 14,000 options in English alone; to fully list all leadership qualities seems like it would be a Herculean task. Such a list should include behaviours, standards and principles which help individuals, teams, organisations and the leaders themselves. Qualities like ‘inclusive’, ‘quiet’, ‘compassionate’, ‘authentic’ and ‘sustainable’, which feature prominently in titles of literature on the subject.

One blog, focused on helping with career development, categorises leadership traits in three helpful areas: personal, people-centred and decision making. The Acas framework for effective leadership gives four key leadership areas: personal style, workplace culture, communication skills and the big workplace issues. What is leadership? A (mostly) harmonious balance of all of them.

What is management?

Defining management is initially straightforward: those who manage give instructions, organise, allocate resources, offer further relevant information. The word itself traces back to an old French term used for holding the reins of a horse. The Institute of Project Management defines management as “the driving force behind the efficient and effective achievement of goals”, achieved by holding a broad range of activities. A CIPD fact sheet states that management helps translate organisational vision and mission to its on-the-ground delivery; turning the vision into reality by guiding a team’s actions and behaviours.

Management comes with different labels; line, middle, senior and so on. Regardless of the flavour, all managers provide direction and oversight to a team, often bearing responsibility for communication to a great number of stakeholders. Without effective and confident managers projects bottleneck, issues remain unresolved and discontentment and frustrations simmer. A helpful analogy might be to see managers as coaches in your sporting event of choice; they’re in the midst of the action, responding and moving things forward as key parts of the team.

The core responsibilities of a manager are planning, organising, directing, controlling. Fundamentally, it is how workflows are organised and directed, and how operations, and employees to meet their goals.

Key differences between leadership and management

Need help distinguishing the two? Management asks how, when and who.  Leadership asks why.

Let’s do a side-by-side comparison: leadership versus management.

Things develop in the space you give them. Where management needs to be in the thick of it, leadership requires space for reflection to “explore the questions that don’t get time or attention in day-to-day”.

It’s easy to see why the terminologies are often conflated; even Forbes magazine uses them interchangeably when compiling their list of top 15 management books. Clearly, there is a relationship between the two. But be wary of the danger that follows the seemingly logical assumption that if all managers are leaders, then all leaders are managers. Remember, cousins not twins – leadership and management have things in common but are not the same thing.

Can you be both a leader and a manager?

Two thirds of UK managers receive no training; not some, not minimal, but none. Nothing that will help them feel equipped to take on the daunting duty of being in charge. The horror stories of bad bosses may provide quality car-crash entertainment when on a Reddit thread, but being subjected to the associated risks is a very different matter. Consequences can range from upset and dissatisfaction, all the way through to loss of business, grievances and disciplinaries, to employment tribunals and settlements. In a worst-case scenario, there may even be legal consequences to poor management.

It’s not a question of can you be both, rather knowing how and when you should be both: both are skillsets that have to be developed in order to lead with confidence. The best people managers combine leadership and management, giving vision and instruction. Giving necessary attention to the people and the processes, to the why and the how, helps build trust, better support individuals and teams, and shape organisational culture.

Managers should want to grow their confidence and skills in helping best support their team. It’s possible to cultivate tools and strategies around resilience, trust-building, delegation and feedback. You may just need a bit of help developing your managerial and leadership toolkit.

Why both leadership and management skills matter in the workplace

Role titles which contain ‘Leader’ or ‘Manager’ often sit in comparable places in org charts. It’s not uncommon to have some strategic and some operational responsibilities combined in one role – both sets of skills matter to your workplace and workforce health and flourishing.

Poor management has a number of hidden costs. It can be a lack of autonomy following micromanagement. A failure to recognise and develop talent which could help grow your business. Repeated inconsistencies that can lead to uncertainty and unnecessary stress. Low morale which eventually evolves into an erosion of team cohesion, culture and trust. Retention becomes difficult. No one wins.

All of these can be proactively addressed through management and leadership development. “A well-trained, emotional intelligent manager can transform a work environment, driving engagement, collaboration, and performance.” Leadership qualities such as effective communication can be built through learning from case studies, or in workshops. Effective leadership depends on trained and equipped leaders.

How to develop your leadership and management skills

Most who manage or lead will have realised, slowly or suddenly, that there is more to their role than simply being in charge. It is often at this point that they begin to develop curiosity and skills to undertake their responsibilities with greater confidence, investing in their own growths and skillsets.

Author, speaker and leadership expert Simon Sinek offers a wealth of wisdom on how such skills can be developed. His company’s main mantra: develop and share tools that help people be the leader they wish they had. In a recent article, he offers this as an example: “Look at your team’s performance metrics […]: do these measure what we say we value, or just what’s easy to count? Pick one behaviour that matters to your culture and find a way to make it visible and rewarded. Add it to the scoreboard. Watch what your team starts doing more of.”

There is a wealth of accessible TED talks, books, podcasts, training courses (including Cornerstone’s very own Lead with Confidence and Leadership Management Training) and other resources whose goal is to help you explore and discern more of your own style and approach to holding leadership or management responsibilities. Developing your leadership and management skills can feel like a daunting task, but practical, actionable guidance is at hand.

You can also consider a learning and development strategy for you organisation to up-skill your leaders and managers to achieve success, whatever success looks like for your organisation.

Leadership and management are not the same; to confuse them is understandable. Both are important for healthy, thriving workplaces. Overlooking or ignoring the differences between leadership and management is a risk can – and should – be mitigated.