Managers versus Leaders in Power

By Raul Bernardino


There are different characteristics of the managers and the leaders in power. The managers use to use a hierarchy line to do a plan with one clear goal. Thereafter, the manager will put several clear objectives together towards to the setting goals, and plan the activities to reach their respective objectives. All plan activities are calculated within the associate cost and schedule of the deliverables. It is including the evaluation time frame for the quality control purposes. Every detail is needed in the written plan and it is including the indicators that are expected to achieve. Each employee that is under the managers lines have to know their tasks individually, in order to have high productivity and easy to control and measure.

While the leaders characteristic are just have to put the guidelines or goals and ask or move the down lines to be creative, initiative, and innovative to reach the overall goal. The leaders delegate power to down line to be success. The leader has the ability to move the individuals that under his or her supervision to arrive in the goal, it is not because the leader has asked them to do it or the leader is planning a head, however those individuals are volunteers to do so. This situation can motivate the employees to be more innovative, create, and have high productivities.

The researchers have been seen the value of leadership as ‘a celebrity bosses’ or has charismatic power in particular were responsible for the rapid and radical changes whereas caused organizational deterioration (Buchanan and Huczynski, p. 696)

“According to transformational leadership theory, both leaders and managers are engaged in the same task of getting the best out of people, they just have different influencing styles” (McCrimmon, p. 5, 2006).

In sort a leader move along with the things while manager focus is getting thing done.   

Nowadays, the era of the revolution of the information and technology, the leadership and the management styles are mostly use the participatory approaches in the dealing with the decision making processes. The leader usually, faster to take decisions and comes with new ideas and paradigm. They can see clearly the trend of the market and adjust new Information Technology platform in to the business very quick. They also have the ability to convince the business owner to move forward. While managers are stick in planning as much as in their planning are accurately, effectively and efficiently. The manager is usually transforming human thinking in to the realization of the activities plan.

The leaderships are easily adapted and adjusted to the new environment while the managers are contemporaries. The manager is quite hard to follow the leader method.

With the argument and theory above, I can see that, the mangers are more relative stable than the leaders in terms of the productivities, of the result or of the outcomes. It is because sometimes, in same cases the individuals are wrong interpreting the leader’s views or ideas, especial on the political views of the political leaders.

For the future development, I do think that the leaders have to learn from the society and adjust and adapt more quick as possible. It is because, nowadays, the information revolution,  global communication, global migration, global market or free market in which they are more integrated, and lot of the information are also cross border. It is including the culture and the language interaction and it is making leaders more difficult to use their ability in power and decision making. For example in the Middle East, it had born democracy in which is resulting demonstrations towards their leaders in the power. The Leaders in the Middle East thinks that they still have a power to persuade their people; unfortunately, it is not the case more. Because, the flows of information have been influence their people in society whereas they have learned from other societies around the world via the internet communication and social networks.

References:

·        Buchanan, D. & Huczynski, A. (2007), Organizational Behaviour: an introductory text. 6th edition. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall

·        McCrimmon, Mitch (2006) Zaleznik and Kotter on Leadership, [On-line]. Available from: www.leadersdirect.com/Zaleznik%20and%20Kotter%20on%20Leadership.pdf  (Accessed: 7 February 2013)

·        Participative Management [on-line]. Available from: http://elsmar.com/pdf_files/participative%20management.pdf (Accessed: 7 February 2013)

·        21^st Century of Information fluency [on-line]. Available from:  http://21cif.com/tutorials/micro/mm/searchprocess/  (Accessed: 7 February 2013)