Management Vs Leadership

They are a lot of successful businesses in the world and in contrast they are a lot of poor or not so successful businesses, the question one then raises is; what separates the two? how does one business do so well yet another suffers?. The long and short of it all one would say is that there are differences in management and leadership between the two companies. The purpose of this essay then is to examine and determine the tenets of management and those of leadership and then to compare and contrast on the two, as well as identify how exactly these two principles affect a business be it positively or negatively.

To begin with it is important to note that the activities of a business can be grouped into six different classes, the first of which is the technical activities these activities include but are not limited to; the production and or manufacturing of good and services (Diploma in Insurance Services, 2017). The Second business activity as stated by (Diploma in Insurance Services, 2017) is that of a financial kind, for instance the searching and usage of capital within the business. The third business activity is a commercial activity; this is what most people consider business because it is what most people are involved in on a day to day basis. The commercial activity is the selling, buying and even sometimes exchange of goods and services. The fourth business activity is security, businesses are involved with the protection of property and person, whether this property be theirs or someone else or whether the personnel is their own or another business’ (Diploma in Insurance Services, 2017).

The fifth business activity is an accounting one, businesses are liable; to themselves, their employees or employers, as well as the government. Due to these fact businesses at the end of the day are concerned with their “bottom line” or ‘end result’, businesses are concerned with maintaining and managing their accounts and statistics. The sixth business activity is one that will constitute one half of this essay and that is the managerial activity, this concerns itself with the; controlling, commanding, organizing, panning and co-ordinating of activities involved in the business. (Diploma in Insurance Services, 2017)

On the topic of management alone there has been numerous developments stretching from the twentieth century all the way to the present date. Many theories were developed over this period to better understand management, the main purpose of understand management was from an organisational context, what this mean is that the strategies of management came about to better help organisations grow (Templar, 2005). Templar (2005) states that some of the theories that help us understand management overall are theories such as the; Administrative or classical theory, the Contingency theory, systems theory and the Human relations theories among many others.

However, these are not the focus of our topic, the focus of topic is to better understand management and for one to do that one must first know what management is. Peter Drucker (1909-2005) asserts that the underlying duty of management involves both innovation and marketing, this ‘Practice’ of management came about during the sixteenth century when a study was conducted to find out the reasons behind failures and low efficiency in certain business’. Glen (2017) view management as the organization and coordination of activities within the business so that the business can achieve its desired goal, it is seen as one of the factors of production as explained earlier as a business activity.

Fincham (ND) puts forward several managerial activities, Fincham (ND)believes a manager is supposed to satisfy different entities be it inside or outside the organisation, be able to deal with emergencies, purchasing, recruitment of new employees, accounting, training of new employees, planning the business’ actions, negotiating with different entities, sales as well as dealing with different regulatory authorities. Fincham (ND) goes on further to state that a manager should be able to plan ahead for future requirements, he/she should be able to organize resources, monitor the performance of tasks and seeing out their completion, a manager should be able to deal with and problem that would arise in the business and also identify what is needed or has to be done within the business.

Management has three vital tenets the first is that it is a process that is continuous, and involved related activities. Secondly, managing concentrates on reaching the objectified goals of the organisation and thirdly, managing achieves these goals by utilizing people and the different resources available to the business. managers have several functions which they are expected to carry out; the controlling, directing, organizing, planning and staffing (fincham, ND). Popovici (2012) defines management as the “process of setting and achieving organizational goals through its functions”.

When it comes to Controlling this entails that it is the manager’s duty to establish rules and instructions to his/her fellow workmen in order to identify weaknesses and errors and remedy them to stop recurrences. Under organizing, managers must be able to provide a business with all the necessities it needs, an organisation must have its duties clear defined at all levels, make sure that employees are taking initiative and if this happens good performers should be rewarded to boost morale, this also incorporate the manager having an understandable unit of command subordinates should know which superior to report to. Planning entails that the manager should have good foresight, the manager must foresee as well as make provisions for the future by; identifying organizational goals, and the method used to achieve the desired goals (Popovici, 2012).

Next we shall focus on the leadership aspect of a business, Stogdili as cited in Bohoris and Vorria (2015) puts forward the notion that “there are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to define it”. It is Peter Drucker again who best sums up the definition of leadership Drucker states that a leader can only be defined as someone that has a following, and that in order to have this following one must influence (Yukl, 1989). Quality management principles (2015) states that leaders are all levels and their duty is “establish unity of purpose”, leaders are there to direct as well as create the necessary conditions under which employees are expected to achieve its organizational goals. When there is direction and unity of purpose as well as engagement with people it enables the business to align its resources, policies, processes and strategies in a way that they achieve their objectives.

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