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!