In realizing high
productivity, good customer relationship and the decrease of operational costs
in an organization or corporation you need high and smart performance of your
human resources. For this to happen exactly, your staff members or your human
resources need to be led and managed in an effective way. This is to say you
need effective leadership and management process.
Leadership
and management
These are two different
processes of working with your staff members or working team that performs to
realize result in your organization or company. Though they are different on
their meaning and how they operate but they always need to work together.
Leadership
It is simply a process of
showing your followers (for this case your staff members or subordinates) where
you are supposed to go or what you are supposed to achieve out of your work or
organization, a way to follow and how to go about. This is to say a leader is a
person who knows well the vision of the organization service or business and
he/she spend most of his or her time sharing with his followers this vision
while motivating them to follow it until they achieve as it was planned.
A leader is not a manager
for his/her work is not to manage people instead to lead people through the
right way to the destiny. (We shall see the difference in the next paragraph).
In an organization you will
always have two types of leaders; first are top leaders and second are middle
leaders. Top leaders are those whom carry the general vision of an organization
for instance a Chief executive Officers or presidents from whom the middle
leaders are reporting to. Middle leaders are leading people in different organization
programs, or departments, their work is a bit heavier than top leaders because
they serve people on top of them (top leaders), they serve their followers
(subordinates) they serve customers on the other side and they serve external
stakeholders like sponsors etc. These people are like country directors, team leaders
etc.
However for effective and
productive leadership in an organization, both types of leaders need some skill
set around effective relationship management, visionary leadership and styles,
their personality mastery, organizational behavior and culture plus management
skills for sometime a leader will have to manage his/her followers depending on
the circumstance or advice his/her managers.
Management
This is a process of
assuring the execution of planned objectives of an organization by your working
team so as to realize expected results. A manager here will be a person who is
supervising people or staff members to work on their roles in day to day
schedule. A manager is following the vision as it has been directed to him by
leaders through supervising a working team engagement in executing their
provided tasks.
In 21st century
a manager must also be a leader to some extent because dealing with people is
not like dealing with machines. In today’s working world people have a lot of
stressing situations in their personal life which may affect their working
ability hence a manager must be concerned with people he/she is managing for
him/her to help when they face personal or family challenges.
Employees always leave
their job badly due to ineffective managers; bad mangers always decrease
organization productivity plus destroying customer relationship and
organization reputation. What they need is training on management skills which
will enable them to be good at; building up their teams, work delegation,
communication and presentation skills, managing people’s relation in an
organization, project planning, time management, quality assurance of
production process and end products plus participating his/her subordinates in
planning their tasks etc.
Remember:
For a leader to be
successful he/she need successful and smart managers who will put into practice
all his ideas. This is to say a manager is brought in an organization by a
leader and they work together in motivating their subordinates to put into practice
all the planned ideas.
Leadership and management
in the 21st century rejects dictatorship and being bosses instead it
needs friendship and good relationship between all participants of these
processes i.e. leaders and managers against followers (staff members). They
also need maximum learning due to the fact that with rapid technology
development, situations changes every day, so regardless your talent in
leadership or management you need to lean more skills which will make you fit
into recent situation of your organization behavior and external forces.
Erick Chrispin
Dar es Salaam Tanzania
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