Leadership vs. management

March 2, 2009 in Uncategorized

What is the differences between leadership and management? One way to see it – and this is a much debated topic – is that management is about careful planning and strict implementation of these plans; it’s about hiring the right people, setting up budgets and distributing responsibility. Leadership on the other hand is about alignment; getting everyone to face in the same direction, inspiring them and pulling towards the same goal. Because of this, leadership is more important when an organization is forced to change.

While the differences between «leadership» and «management» is at best disputed in English, the situation is even worse in Norwegian. To my knowledge, we have no separate words for leadership and management in Norwegian (although the words «leder» and «sjef» carry different meanings that lean towards «leader and manager, respectively). For instance, NTNU teaches a subject with the Norwegian name «endringsledelse», which is similar to the Norwegian translation of «Transformational Leadership». Perhaps surprisingly, the english title of the subject does not even include the word «leadership», but «management». Interesteingly, while management is often tought in business schools, most believe leadership is learned by supported/guided* doing. Thus the Norwegian business school student might know a lot about management while (unknowingly) have poor skills in «ledelse» because he/she knows very little about leadership.

Because management and leadership are different things, the challenge of those seeking a «lederstilling» should know that their challenges will broadly fall into two  categories, not one. Being aware of semantics will probably not solve any problems, but it might help noticing what kind of tool will be needed to get the job done.

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* Incidentally, this is why you should consider showing up at the CTL seminars every other Tuesday if you are already in a leadership position and would like to get even better at leading

PS: There is probably an argument to be made as to why «ledelse» means both leadership and management in Norweigan (perhaps something to do with The Jantelov or our less mercantile tradition than the US?), but I will leave that speculation to others.

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