The Difference Between Management Skills and Leadership Skills

To understand the skill-set differences between a manager and a leader, you first must define the two.  A manager maintains the everyday operations and supervises personnel to accomplish a short-term list of goals.  A leader is forward-thinking and more of a visionary.  This person will question the everyday operations and ask how business can be accomplished faster and cheaper while improving accuracy.  The skill-set is not significantly different, but their ways of thinking are.

I believe that is a key difference between a manager and a leader – the style or mode of thinking.  Both are critical thinkers, but perhaps a leader practices this significantly more often.  A leader looks beyond ‘today’ to focus on the future.  A leader is an innovator and developer while a manager maintains and administers.

Management skills are taught and may be sharpened through exposure and practice.  Leadership skills must be acquired through execution and resolve.  From Leslie L. Kossoff, ‘Leaders aren’t made or born.  Leadership is a choice – a belief in and commitment to everything that is good and noble within you’.

Many people, including me, have often considered the titles of ‘leader’ and ‘manager’ as interchangeable.  After much reading and research, I’ve come to understand that they are vastly different.  In fact, it’s now fairly easy for me to identify the leaders and managers of a corporation based on criteria I identified earlier.  One distinction between a manager and a leader that I consider significant and very telling is summarized well by Jill Geisler:  ‘As I see it, people are required to follow managers.  They choose to follow leaders’.

In assessing my own management and leadership skills, I struggle.  It’s difficult to measure myself in these roles.  I feel I have very good management skills and am able to effectively manage a process and personnel.  In terms of leadership skills, I believe I have the foundation to be a good leader.  I have taken the ‘lead’ several times when decisions needed to be made concerning the future of a project or process.  My co-workers and peers value my opinion and I feel I have their respect and confidence, which means a lot to me.  In order to be viewed as a leader, I must put myself in the leadership role as often as possible.  I must practice being a leader.  I must learn from successes and failures equally.

In summary, the differences between a manager and leader aren’t glaring, but they are evident.  As I see it, both rely on each other to succeed and are vital to the success of the corporation.