Understanding Management

Leadership and Management

When we think of managers, it is in our reflexes of understanding that they are leaders as well. These terms are inevitably interchangeable. I attended a recent meetup and got interested with their topic about management. They asked, “What do you think about management?” First words that burst out of minds are, managers should be good listeners, motivators, mentors, non-micromanagers.

Everyone is always expecting for managers to be these ideal leaders. One thing I learned for the past years of working is that, “leaders may be managers, but not all managers are leaders.” It is good and admirable if you are both but in reality, it’s hard.

Let’s understand these terms individually.

Management is more on administering and making sure that the day-to-day tasks are being done as they should while leadership on the other hand is about getting people believe and understand your visions and work with you to achieve those goals… even without the title.

In conclusion, management is doing things right and leadership is doing the right things.

I HATE MY MANAGER!

One thing to note is there are different styles of management and leadership. As members of the team, what we can do is to trust our managers regarding their strategy because managing a team comes with different factors to take on like cost, timeline, requirements, clients, and more before.

Management and leadership style depends on situation and is best when mixed. An example of this is micromanagement. People find it cringe-y and toxic. But micromanagement is actually acceptable in cases like, the project is on a tight timeline already or is already running out of budget.

There is no perfect manager but one this is sure for managers… The ultimate goal is to finish the project with high quality, on time, on a budget and building long term relations with clients.

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