One the best explanation that I have read or heard is from Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Management is a bottom line focus: How can I best accomplish certain things? Leadership deals with the top line: What are the things I want to accomplish? In the words of both Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
You can quickly grasp the important difference between the two if you envision a group of producers cutting their way through the jungle with machetes. They're the producers, the problem solvers. They're cutting through the undergrowth, clearing it out.
The managers are behind them, sharpening their machetes, writing policy and procedure manuals, holding muscle development programs, bringing in improved technologies and setting up working schedules and compensation programs for matchete wielders.
The leader is the one who climbs the tallest tree, suveys the entire situation, and yells, "wrong jungle!"
But how do the busy, efficient producers and managers often respond? "Shut up!" We're making progress."
As individuals, groups and businesses, we're often so busy cutting through the undergrowth we don't even realize we're in the wrong jungle. And the rapidly changing environment in which we live makes effective leadership more critical than it has ever been -- in every aspect of independent and interdependent life.
We are more in need of a vision or destination and a compass (a set of principles or directions) and less in need of a road map.
You need both to be successful, however, if a group does not have strong leadership, it will keep doing things the way they have been doing without new innovation and thereby susceptible to disruptive technologies and rivalrous competition. Be careful as a leader to not just manage!
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