I was having this conversation recently and mentioned this article, and lo and behold this morning it appears in my feed. (This post isn’t my usual complaint about algorithms although my issues there continue to be the same).
This article was first written in 1977, when Harvard Business School professor Abraham Zaleznik published an HBR article with the deceptively mild title “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?”, which caused an uproar in business schools.
Today, leadership is formally taught in a distinct way from management in MBA degrees and other courses, so it appears the answer to this 40+yo question is “yes”.
I’ve seen clickbaity posts on LinkedIn that say cute things about “managers doing X but leaders do Y”. The reality is, you can do both, it doesn’t have to be one or the other, but it’s useful to understand the differences.
The article explains that “leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action” and both are necessary for success.
I’ve worked in organisations that excelled at management – processes documented, systems running smoothly, complexity handled well – but struggled when market conditions shifted because they lacked leadership capable of driving change. And I’ve seen the opposite: visionary leadership with big ideas about transformation but no management capability to actually implement them. Both skillsets matter.
“Management is about coping with complexity. Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change”.
