"A Good Manager Will Always Be a Good Leader" -Leadership & management, differences between.

Essay by heyheyspecialkCollege, UndergraduateB+, April 2010

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A Good Manager Will Always be a Good Leader

In this essay I will demonstrate how a good manager can often be a good leader, but why I also believe that explicit differences in characteristics; attitudes and methods prove them to be unique. I will do this by firstly, defining what I feel a good manager is, and what I feel a good leader is. In doing this, I will compare and contrast the two concepts in order to finally draw conclusive similarities and distinctions between the two.

American philosopher James Burnham (1941)� christened the post-"industrial revolution" epoch in the title of his book; "The Managerial Revolution"1. In contrast to the bygone period in which the primary economic progress lay in technological progress, Burnham emphasised that the "contemporary era" depended heavily on human resources- on the leadership skills of men and women to "impel economic development" with their direction and co-ordinating of others' individual efforts in the business of living.

There has been an evident 're-invention', as such, of the term management. It has thus become increasingly difficult to successfully define it. Whereas traditionally, French industrialist Henri Fayol's (1916)� humble description of one who "plans, organises, co-ordinates and controls" has dominated our perceptions, today we take a more precise and realistic approach to the meaning of this title.

Leadership too lacks a definite, universally accepted meaning, except of course in the literal sense of the adjective leading; "to show the way by going with ... to serve as the means of reaching a place" (Hanks, 1986)�. Clegg et al. (2008)� describes it as a term that is "one of the most over-theorised, over-researched, and empirically messy areas of management and organisation". The issue with leadership is not that the meaning has evolved (like management), but that the term is "tossed...