What is It That Makes a Leader?
Managing and leading are different functions and require distinct skills. Consequently, there are some key differences between being a leader and being a manager. Managers are not necessarily good leaders. While the main role of managers is to maintain stability and order in an organization, leaders do more than that. In this 1977 essay, psychoanalyst and scholar Abraham Zaleznik explores in depth what he finds to be the main differences between managers and leaders. Not only from a practical standpoint but also as far as the psychological traits and attitudes that are characteristic of leaders and managers are concerned. In the essay, leaders and managers are viewed as archetypal representations of being. A depiction that goes deeper than the mere functions leaders and managers have in organizations.
Managers conserve and strive to maintain order in an organization, abiding by the rules. Leaders invent creatively. They have a higher purpose and value individuality and authentic relationships. Particularly, Zaleznik reckons that leaders are mostly born so. There are, therefore, inherent psychological and physiological characteristics that are unique to leaders, especially when compared to managers. The analysis of leaders and managers made by Zaleznik does not look at the concept of "leader" as the authoritative figure of a group. The leader is a personality and behavioral archetype.
Zaleznik identifies five main dimensions based on which to compare managers and leaders. First, he digs into personality differences. Personality traits are by definition fixed, and on this part of the article, Zaleznik focuses therefore on inherent differences between managers and leaders. He then proceeds to analyze the attitude toward goals of managers versus leaders. Thirdly, he presents some differences concerning the conception of work, to then expand into relationships and sense of self. The essay is concluded with an explanation of how leadership is developed and passed through generations.
Personality and Attitude Toward Goals
When it comes to personality and attitude approaches, "Business leaders have much more in common with artists than they do with managers." Business leaders are creative, courageous, intrinsically motivated. In the modern world, Zaleznik argues, organizations are characterized by bureaucratic and inflexible structures, which seek defensiveness and control. This widespread organizational culture fosters the development of managers as opposed to leaders because stiff organizations yearn for stability and orderliness. "This is the default status of businesses". Training to become and being a manager requires no genius nor heroism. By contrast, there is no known way of making a leader, as Zaleznik writes.
““The manager asks: what problems have to be solved, and what are the best ways to achieve results so that people will continue to contribute to this organization?””
When it comes to attitudes toward goals, managers tend to adopt a passive and impersonal approach. They do what needs to be done, whenever the need arises. And this is a key difference between managers and leaders. The latter archetype adopts an active and visionary behavior to doing things; leaders try to spot trends before consumers are even aware of them (e.g. Edwin Land with Polaroid, Steve Jobs with Apple). Leaders set the direction of an organization. Managers follow that direction and rationally strive to keep order.
Conception of Work
Also in the conception of work the two archetypes differ. There appears to be a key dissimilarity in the time horizon based on which managers and leaders operate. Managers are short-term focused, and perceive work as a balancing process of compromising and reducing choices to comply with tradition and the immediate direction of the organization. They do so often using coercive measures in order to coordinate and balance opposing views. Leaders act in the opposite direction: they create fresh approaches to arising or long-standing problems. They work from high-risk, high-reward positions, which Zaleznik considers to be a tendency stemming from personality traits of leaders.
““Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” ”
Relationships
The last two dimensions treated by Zaleznik are relationships and sense of self. Managers and leaders differ significantly in the way they approach relationships. Following the line of reasoning made throughout the essay, the author explains that managers are dependent on relationships with other people. They need other people in order to keep a sense of stability and control. However, they tend to see other people as part of a system, relating to them according to the role they play. In addition, those who manage (which at this point mostly describes individual and cultural characteristics of people) possess the characteristic of maintaining a low emotional involvement in relationships. And this particular trait results, oftentimes, in being perceived as cold and detached from subordinates. The last point characterizing the approach to relationships of "managers" is that these individuals tend to communicate with subordinates through signals. Signals are vague, indirect, encoded, leaving a lot of space for personal interpretation.
On the other hand, leaders tend to be okay with solitude and working singularly. They are concerned with ideas rather than processes. Good leaders relate to people in an empathetic manner. The term empathetic is described by Zaleznik as "the capacity to take in emotional signals and make them meaningful in a relationship." Daniel Goleman, father of Emotional Intelligence, offers some great insights on how to become more emotionally intelligent in this recent interview. Last but not least, leaders communicate through messages, as opposed to signals. Messages are powerful, emotionally charged, involving, inspiring, direct. It is the direct nature of leaders' communication that makes them attract strong polarizing feelings of love or hate. Human relations in leader-dominated structures appear disorganized and turbulent but are also packed with motivation and intensity.
Sense of Self
The last dimension presented in the article looks at how managers and leaders differ in the field of self-perception and personal fulfillment. To explain this point, Zaleznik refers to the division of personality types made by William James in "The Varieties of Religious Experience". According to James, there are two broad categories of personality types: the once-born and the twice-born. Individuals falling under the first category are those whose lives have been peaceful and in a stable flow since birth. Twice-borns, on the other hand, have not had an easy time of it. They have been constantly struggling to bring order into chaos. Managers tend to be once-born: their self-worth stems from maintaining and strengthening existing institutions, in harmony with the surrounding environment. Leaders are twice-born. Their sense of who they are does not depend on their work role, sense of membership, or other social indicators. They are in constant motion, and they seek change and innovation. Their sense of self comes from a feeling of profound separateness from reality as it is.
The Development of a Leader
““Great teachers take risks. They bet initially on talent they perceive in younger people. And they risk emotional involvement in working closely with their juniors.””
To conclude the essay, Zaleznik provides his thoughts on how leaders can be formed and developed, if at all possible. He postulates that one-on-one relationships are the key to developing leadership in organizations or any other setting. It is the cross-pollution of generations that makes a difference in the formation of proper leaders. Dwight Eisenhower is an example of this, as supporting evidence of the importance of cross-generational, one-on-one relationships in the formation of leaders. Managers often refrain from the idea of one-on-one relationships due to the fact that these relationships may be charged with emotions, hence fear-provoking for many of them.
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