What Leaders Really Do

Kotter’s classic article What Leaders Really Do (2001) states that whilst a manager’s primary focus is coping with complexity and bringing order to ensure productivity and profits, a leader’s principal focus is coping with and delivering change through vision and strategies. For example, troops can be managed during peacetime, but can only be led on battlefields.

These different focuses dictate the different actions each group takes to achieve their respective goals. Managers use planning and budgeting to decide what needs to be done, organising and staffing to build networks and relationships, and controlling and problem-solving to ensure successful implementation. Leaders use vision and strategy to determine what needs to be accomplished, build relationships by aligning people, and solve implementation issues by motivating and inspiring through tapping into human needs, values and emotions.

Leaders must be good managers first. If not, this is worse than the reverse. The real challenge is combining both management and leadership and using each to balance the other.

References

Kotter, J. (2001) What Leaders Really Do. Harvard Business Review. Available from: https://hbr.org/2001/12/what-leaders-really-do [Accessed 10 August 2022]