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What leaders really do by John P.kotter

The article reprinted here stands on its own, of course, but it can also be

seen as a crucial contribution to a debate that began in 1977, when

Harvard Business School professor Abraham Zaleznik published an

HBR article with the deceptively mild title "Managers and Leaders: Are

They Different?" The piece caused an uproar in business schools. It

argued that the theoreticians of scientific management, with their

organizational diagrams and time-and-motion studies, were missing half

the picturethe half filled with inspiration, vision, and the full spectrum

of human drives and desires. The study of leadership hasn't been the

same since.

"What Leaders Really Do," first published in 1990, deepens and extends

the insights of the 1977 article. Introducing one of those brand-new

ideas that seems obvious once it's expressed, retired Harvard Business

School professor John Kotter proposes that management and leadership

are different but complementary, and that in a changing world, one

cannot function without the other. He then enumerates and contrasts the

primary tasks of the manager and the leader. His key point bears

repeating: Managers promote stability while leaders press for change,

and only organizations that embrace both sides of that contradiction can

thrive in turbulent times.

Leadership is different from management, but not

for the reasons

most people think. Leadership isn't mystical and mysterious. It has

nothing to do with having "charisma" or other exotic personality traits. It

is not the province of a chosen few. Nor is leadership necessarily better

than management or a replacement for it.

TWO DEFINITIONS OF MANAGEMENT AND

LEADERSHIP

:

1.

Management =

Coping with complexity to bring order and

predictability to a situation (e.g., planning and budgeting, setting

targets or short-term goals for the future, establishing steps to achieve

targets and allocating resources to accomplish plans).

2.

Leadership =

Adapting to change (e.g., setting direction to

achieve a vision of the longer-term future with strategies to produce

the change needed to achieve the vision).

There are two major disconnects here when we look at this through the

lens of strengths. The first has to do with the hierarchical approach.

While it is reasonable and healthy to consider management and

leadership as two separate constructs or roles, it is simply erroneous to

impose a dichotomy between the two layers in ways that suppose

hierarchy. It presumes that the skills of the manager are not needed for

leadership and, conversely, that leadership is not necessary to manage.

Neither is correct. The reason so many people struggle to differentiate

leadership from management is because of how embedded inside of one

another they are. Separating them for the sake of definition is fine, but

doing so for the sake of hierarchical differentiation is foolish. To do so,

and to leave complexity to "managers" and "leaders" to bear sole

responsibility for navigating change is nothing more than a setup for

failure.

The second disconnect has to do with the idea that leadership, being

responsible for adapting to change, requires specific talents, a diverse

view, and strong selection and grooming from past leaders, as Kotter

makes clear throughout the article. This has numerous issues - most

notably the denial of the fact that everyone is a leader in their own right.

To presuppose that strong leaders can be selected for, leads to the

inevitable belief that others are not cut out for leadership. This is false.

Further, when we approach leadership through the lens of strengths and

understand that real leadership comes from deep understanding of the

"why" of an individual and/or organization, then adapting to change,

which is almost always the "what" and on rare occasions, the "how",

becomes much easier, if not outright obvious. So, even accepting the

definitions as given by Kotter what is absolutely missing is the idea that

adapting to change is not a skillset in and of itself, but rather comes from

clarity of self and of the true intent of the organization.