Leadership and Management

Traditional thought on Leadership and Management distinguishes the two aspects:

• Motivational style
• Formal structure

The general belief is that Leaders lead people while managers manage tasks. In the knowledge society that we operate out of today, Leadership and Management have by passed their boundaries and are very close terms with a great dynamism. Today, Leaders need to have management skills to handle resources for the purpose, and Managers need to adapt their own style of leadership to effectively encourage and charge their team members to the particular objective.

Leadership styles vary with the leader; one might have varied focus in their leadership style – people or process, transactional or transformational, democratic or dictatorial etc. Mangers, whose scope of operation was initially limited to marshaling the available resources and keep things afloat can no longer be said to be the need of the day; managers need to understand their team well, the strength and weakness of the members etc.

Motivated team members achieve more than, just incentive lead mechanism of task completion. The manager today needs to align the interest of the team members and get them to volunteer for the purpose of the group. A manager who fails to motivate and drive the interest of the team members would not just be a failure in his role but also be detrimental to the company’s prospects.

It is a well acknowledged fact that a major cause of attrition in today’s industry is the immediate boss. The team member would always look up to his/her immediate boss for suggestions, or encouragement in a work scenario and when that is missing it leads not just to dissatisfaction but also to failure of the team structure. Companies today need to ensure that the first level managers understand their task pretty clearly and encourage them to lead and not just limit themselves to manage their resources.

Read in Kannada: http://somanagement.blogspot.com/2011/03/blog-post_07.html