1.1.

Differences between a manager and a leader

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

Peter F. Drucker

Analyzing the differences between a manager and a leader has been the subject of
numerous academic paper works, since the two terms, for the ones not familiarized with the
management field of activity, seem more than similar.
The term “leader” was first used around 1800, but its meaning adjusted throughout the
years to the changes that occurred in the business sector. For a better understanding of the
differences between a manager and a leader, we will proceed to highlight the definition of
”leader”, as enunciated by Oxford Dictionaries:

Leader ( noun ):
1. The person who leads or commands a group, organization, or country.
1.1. (in the UK) a member of the government officially responsible for initiating
business in the House of Commons or House of Lords.
1.2.  The person or team that is winning a sporting competition at a particular time.
1.3. An organization or company that is the most advanced or successful in a
particular area.( Oxford dictionaries )
In my opinion, a good manager is also a good leader, and this is the main idea on
which this subchapter is founded. Unfortunately, while some consider that all managers are
also leaders, this is a false statement, since some of the managers don’t exercise leadership,
while other can lead, without having a managerial position.
The work of managers is about performing the functions of planning, organizing,
controlling, staffing and directing, while leadership focuses more on establishing a
connection, aligning people, motivating and inspiring (O'Neill, 2011: p.12 ). The nature of one’s
leadership and management roles implies that effective relationships are mandatory for
productive workplace relationships. The problem that arises is based on the inability of the
one who leads to be able to find a balance between exercising the authority with which he/she
is invested and still succeeding in maintaining good relations with his/her subordinates. This
is due to the fact that employees tend to undermine the authority of a manager who is trying
to integrate into the group of people he leads, so, as a result, the majority of managers prefer

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to adopt an impartial position when it comes to the employees. A number of different factors
underpin a good relationship, which include:

 Trust;
 Developing empathy for understanding;
 Demonstrating openness to others’ ideas ( O'Neill, 2011: p.29 ).

In the new economic area, when value comes increasingly from the knowledge of
people, management and leadership shouldn’t be separated anymore. Business has
contributed its answer to the leadership question by evolving a new breed called the manager
and has established a new power ethic that favors collective over individual leadership, the
cult of the group over that of personality. Even if the concept of leadership and management
overlap, and share similar roles, they are, as previously stated, not the same. The similarity
between both managers and leaders is reflected in the primary mission of both, that is to
control and influence other people, while the main difference is given by the approach used to
achieve these goals. For a better understanding of the contrast between these terms, I
compiled the following table, focusing on the most important differences.

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 Manager Leader

- Impersonal, passive, attitudes toward - Personal and active attitude toward

goals;
- Prefers to work with people; they
avoid solitary activity because it makes them
anxious;
- Delegate responsibility;
- Delegates authority;
- Implements the vision;
- Controls processes;
- Identifies problems;
- Solves problems;
- Monitor results;
- Takes low risk approach to problem
solving.
- Focuses on systems and structure
goals, shaping ideas instead of responding to
them;
- Attract strong feelings of identity and
difference or of love and hate;
- Communicates the vision, mission
and direction;
- Influences creation of coalitions,
teams and partnerships that understand and
accept the vision;
- Motivates and inspires ;
- Energizes employees to overcome
barriers to change;
- Satisfies basic human needs,
focuses on people.

As a conclusion, we can state that every organisation needs managers and leaders, and
it would be perfect if these two roles would be viewed as complementary to one another. The
company can reach its optimal point of effectiveness only if that organisation has strong
leadership and strong management. In today’s dynamic workplace, organizations need
leaders to cope with new challenges, and transform organizations in order to achieve a
competitive advantage in the marketplace, and they need managers to maintain a smoothly
functioning workplace, and to utilize resources effectively ( Kotterman, 2006: p.16 ). As Peter
Drucker stated: “The task is to lead people. And the goal is to make productive the specific
strengths and knowledge of every individual.”
1.2. An efficient manager

What makes a manager efficient is a question addressed by many people, no matter

their position or their social status. And, to be honest, is quite a difficult one, since each and
every one of us defines the term “efficient” in different ways.
The twentieth century was the one in which corporations grew and evolved so quickly
and rapidly that even those educational institutions specifically designed to prepare people for
such corporations were left far behind. Not even the finest business schools from nowadays
can instill in their students the attitude necessary to make the most out of a career as a
manager in a giant organization, and this is due to the fact that the general setting in these
institutions is too stable, sane and simple. In other words, it has nothing to do with the chaotic
world of business that students face after graduation. The problem is that most of them never
lose their student mindset, behaving as if they were in an orderly and stable atmosphere.
An efficient manager knows that he or she will have to survive in a turbulent
environment and no one will lead their road for them. They approach their own careers with
the same proactive, strategic attitude that they use to improve the productivity of their
companies. This leads to achieving better results with less work. (Ozyasar , 2008: p. 38 )
The first responsibility as an efficient manager is to obtain results. This is maybe the
most important concept regarding the position of a manager, since you have to seek the best
way to fulfill the organization’s requests. In other words, you need to do what the company
tells you to do. This is a difficult task for the majority of managers, since it is hard to define,
for example, which are the five most important results they have to obtain for the company in
a specific year, or to enunciate their key-responsibilities. And this is difficult not because they
do not know what they have to do, but because it is hard to quantificate their responsibilities.
A way to make this easier is to have the objectives defined in percentages or numbers, for
example: “Increasing the profit by 1% compared with the previous month”; “A weekly
increase of the customer service department “.
When the responsibilities aren’t clearly defined, it is hard to obtain the results,
because managers tend to focus on more tasks, since each of them seem important, without
really exceeding in anything. A good way to solve this problem is to get their objectives
straight, by asking their boss what exactly he or she expects from them.
Concentrating exclusively on results can often lead to an abusive attitude towards the
subordinates. When evaluating a manager, the modern organizations from nowadays, that are
conducted in an efficient way, measure also the employees’ retention, besides the
accomplished results. This acts like a brake in the way of concentrating exclusively on
results. Companies want to make sure that the manager’s team members are not willing to
leave the firm. This is because replacing the members can be costly; the loss of one employee
requires more work than initially planned, time and money consumption for interviews or
contests, waste of resources and time for training the new employee, without taking into
consideration the low productivity of the new staff member until he reaches the quality and
quantity of the work performed by the previous one.
We can therefore conclude that these two are the main attributes of an efficient
manager: obtaining results and keeping the employees. Both help with maximizing the
welfare of the workplace and the personal satisfaction. Apart from these two, there are four
fundamental roles that a manager has to fulfill in order to be efficient and successful.
In his book, The efficient manager, Mark Horstman underlines four fundamental roles
a manager has to fulfill in order to be considered efficient: knowing the employees,
communicating regarding the performances, demanding more and delegating responsibilities.
I will discuss in the following pages about all these roles, and also see if these can be
implemented by a manager in the hospitality sector, since this is our main domain of study.
Before doing this, it is important to say that these roles are not equal in value, therefore, they
don’t represent, each of them, 25 % out of the total ( Horstman, 2017: p. 33 ).