Over the past couple of decades, a recurring question that I hear from
people is what are the differences between managers and leaders. and I don't
believe there's a really hard and fast line that completely distinguish the two.
But I do feel that the data, the results give us an interesting place to jump off
of to take a look at ourselves. So let's dig deeper into this.
Hello friends. I'm Alex Lyon.
This is Communication Coach. I'm here to help you increase your
impact and lead your team to higher levels of excellence. And today's topic
is the difference and similarities between managers and leaders. And I've
been asked this question a lot and what I did was I looked at various sources
online and I've done a lot of reading over the years on my own in addition to
a book I wrote on leadership. And what I did is I came up with a little
comparison of all the things that are out there looking at different
categories. And I boiled it down to some basic categories that show what I
feel are pretty clear differences between managers and leaders. And we'll
talk about that in just a moment. But the first point I want to make is
clear in most of the readings that you'll see and most of the people that
you talk to they will tell you that there's no such thing as a hundred
percent manager and a hundred percent leader. Because we all have to do a
little bit of the other. The other thing they'll tell you is that managers are
clearly in a managerial position. Whereas leaders can lead from anywhere. You can
actually be in just an individual contributor role and you don't have a
managerial position of any kind, but you can lead by example and you can put a
lot of influence into your team and actually push them forward in a way that
maybe even the official manager of that team is not doing. So you can lead from
any position. It's a little bit like that movie Ratatouille. A leader can come from
anywhere. Whereas a manager is usually tied to an
official position. So let's now dig down into some of the results here and take a
look at what the overall categories were that I distilled from everything I read.
And by the way I'm going to put links to all those things in this description
below. So you can dig deeper into those sources if you
like to. Let's look at look at managers first. First of all, managers
have a more of a control mindset. They're focused on the administration of
processes and the structure and the resources of the organization. They're
very much into maintaining the status quo. So maintenance is a key part of what
they do and they're very task-focused. So overall managers are working on the
day-to-day tasks and making sure that everything gets done in an orderly
fashion. Leaders, however, are a little bit different. Leaders have a more persuasive
approach to communication rather than controlling. Leaders are focused on
taking the organization from here to there. That's a name of a video series by
Bill Hybels, a great leadership author. He talks about going from A to B. A leader
is different from anybody else because they want to take people from here to
there. In its basic form, that's one of the main ways he sees leadership. Leaders.
also are known for taking risks. Instead of maintaining the status quo and
keeping things steady, they are trying to stretch the organization past what it's
currently doing and that involves taking risks. Leaders are also much more people
focus and relationship focus. They do more mentoring or coaching more teaching.
One of the key differences here is really the whole reason I came up with
this channel, Communication Coach. And that is that I gave a lot of
communication tips and leadership tips because I think the two things are
completely intertwined. If you notice on the leadership side of the equation,
persuasive communication, taking us from here to there, which a lot about casting
a vision and getting people excited about the future, as well as people
focused approach, those three out of the lists are all communication centric. You
have to have great, sophisticated communication skills to do those
leadership functions well. Not so much with this idea of taking risks. I think
that has a little bit more to do with the person's disposition and wanting to
take risks and wanting to push the envelope a little bit.
Now managers, on the other side of the coin, certainly have a lot of important
communication functions, but on this channel we focus more on the leadership side of
the equation. As I said earlier, though, both of these sides of the coin are
important. You have to be a good manager as well as a leader nowadays. Especially
if you're in any kind of small business or team setting, you're going to do a
little bit of both. One of the things people do, however, is--as budget allows
and as the organization grows--they will hire people in the area where they
are not as strong. Many well-known visionary-type leaders, for example, will
hire really good task-oriented managers to balance out that team. So here's my
question and I'd love to hear your comments in this section below.
Question of the day, what are the areas of leadership that
you most want to develop? You can look at the four things that I already mentioned
or you can come up with something else. What are the areas that you want to grow
as a leader. I read almost every single question and respond to almost every
single comment. So I look forward to starting on conversation in that section
below. So thanks. God bless. And until next time I hope you get to use the tips on
this channel your very next opportunity.