What's the Difference between a Manager and a Leader?

What's the difference between a Manager and a Leader?

It's a common question.

Let's start at a junior manager level, a supervisor. Supervisors typically have tasks to manage and achieve. They may oversee a team of people but their authority is around achieving something or ensuring something gets done, compared to actual people management. In other words, they often need skills to motivate people but they typically don't have responsibility for people's career path and movement.

Examples of supervisory roles include, Food Service Supervisor, Call Center Supervisor, Mechanic Shop Supervisor and so many more.

So, then what's a manager? 

Ya, that could take a while. It's a huge grouping of roles, responsibilities, experience levels. We are still often looking at very tactical roles, people who are in charge of getting stuff done, especially operations.

In this case, they often have a team with whom they have a decent scope of authority. A manager is typically making more decisions about the schedule, tasks, and often has some input to how to reach certain outcomes. They may have direct reports and if so, then they should have a lot of people management responsibilities over those direct reports. So, now we're combining operational and personnel management.

So can you be a manager and show leadership - absolutely.  I believe anyone, an employee, a supervisor, a manager, anyone can show leadership.  

Then what makes the difference between a manager and a leader?

Managers tend not to have the strategic responsibilities that a leader has. For example, setting the strategy and vision, the goals for the division or team and owning the P&L or budgets.  Managers tend to be in charge of implementing and reporting on the direction that leaders set. (To be fair, many leaders will closely align with their senior managers to get input and other perspectives while setting strategy and goals, but it's ultimately a leader's role to determine the direction and help get everyone aware and aligned.)

So, leaders are in charge of:

• Strategy
• Vision
• Culture
• Goals
• Direction
• Budgets 
• People

Leaders communicate to and guide their direct reports and work with their leaders and managers to distill the essence and help everyone get on track and stay on track.  Frankly, it's often down to leaders to avoid trouble or clean it up, too.

In hierarchies, you'll often have senior leaders with leaders who report to them and those leaders have managers and individual contributors who report to them. So, it's very likely that a leader will have to both carry out direction established above their level and also set direction for their department or team that aligns with the company objectives.  

The reality is, you'll find individuals and managers everywhere who are doing a LOT more than the leaders they report to. Likewise, you'll find leaders who are knocking it out, going far beyond the responsibilities I described above to drill in and engage with their teams, to invest and examine every detail to make sure it's an awesome working environment that produces great results.

At Boss at the Helm, that's what we want for everyone. It's why I'm on a mission to eradicate bad bosses, by cultivating leadership.  Boss Leaders are those really spectacular people who are aware, they develop and hone their skills and mindset and use their power for the benefit of themselves and those around them.

Leaders might be born, but I'm doubtful. It's more likely that they are taught. I lean much more to the idea that we all have leadership qualities and we choose to develop and grow, to fail and recover, to learn and evolve and use what we have and know for the betterment of others. That's Boss. 

Join me at Boss at the Helm to Develop the Boss Within.

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