I am not someone who is motivated by grand job titles, so it confused me somewhat when a part of a company that I worked for changed the job title of some of its supervisors from “Team Leader” to “Team Manager”. I suspected that the decision was made by someone who thought that being a “Manager” sounded more important than being a “Leader”. I can already find myself disagreeing with this point-of-view. At that point in my career, I don’t think I understood the difference as I do now, but one of the Senior Leaders in the part of the business that I worked in didn’t follow the trend.
What is a Manager?
There are numerous ways in which you can describe the role of a manager. Managers carry out things like
- performance management
- work allocation
- reward decision-making
- hiring and firing
- delivery of the corporate messages
Although this is not a comprehensive list of duties, what you will see is a list of activities that impact their staff. The manager in such a situation is expected to be the vehicle through which the company interacts with its staff.
What is a Leader?
This might be a more difficult question to answer, but here’s a few ideas about what leaders might do:
- coach others to achieve their best performance
- be an expert, can lead from the workplace
- can share workload, ensuring that everyone plays to their strengths
- can interpret corporate messages, delivering meaning
You might think that I’m suggesting that managers can’t be leaders, by choosing different styles of words for the two categories, and maybe I am!
The real differences between leaders and managers
What really separates leaders from managers is simple:
Managers have to push their staff into delivering whereas people will follow leaders and deliver more!
A simple statement may start you thinking about how you are working today. Are you a leader or a manager? I’m sure there are merits in both camps, but I have worked for people managers as well as leaders, and I have a strong preference for leaders. If I think back over my career, I see only a few leaders who got the best out of me; these people created space and opportunities for me to grow as a person, as well as to be able to deliver value to the business.
If you’re an aspiring leader, feel free to comment on this post!
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