MGMT 3000 Professor Judy Kenary
Leadership: The Key to Strong Management
Within the organizational structure of most businesses you will likely find management and leadership coexisting. Commonly, the words are often substituted for one another. However, each word has a distinctly different definition. A manager does not necessarily make a good manager. Management is defined as those individuals in an organization that have the authority and the responsibility to manage the organization through the control of production processes and ensuring that they operate efficiently and effectively. Leadership is defined as the skills and ability to set future goals in accordance with the organizational goals and to communicate those goals to other employees in such a way that they voluntarily and harmoniously work together to accomplish those goals for the benefit of the organization.
Any organization needs to be managed; even a one-person company has to be managed. A manager has four key responsibilities: 1) planning, 2) organizing, 3) leading, and 4) controlling. Management can also be defined as the function that determines how the organization’s human, financial, physical, informational, and technical resources are arranged and coordinated to perform tasks towards achievement of strategic goals.
Leadership implies that the manager has fundamental knowledge about critical processes.
We live in an era of communication challenges. It is an age of increasingly scarce management and education to the markets of tomorrow. To solve this problem, to improve and restore the competitive edge of business, I recommend teaching leadership as well as organization. We need to move beyond the simplistic and boring, everyday organizational skills commonly taught in core courses in business schools. Important as these skills are, we need to redirect our focus towards the essential ingredient required to put these skills to work –