When discussing business leadership, the distinction between good management and good leadership is often made. Managers are thought to be the budgeters, the organizers, the controllers — the ants, as one observer puts it — while leaders are the charismatic, big-picture visionaries, the ones who change the whole ant farm. But such a construction, those interviewed for this article agree, erroneously leads to a bimodal way of looking at something that should really be evaluated on two separate scales. "Everybody has got a little bit of each in them," says John Kotter, who admits he is sometimes guilty of using the dichotomy in an effort at simplification. "It's much better to think in terms of measuring people on a zero-to-ten scale for each quality."
[This article was provided with permission from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.]
This is a great article. Leaders also need to create a sense of purpose and importantly larger than life purpose for all the people working for him or her. Leaders need to help their followers to live in truth (borrowing Vaclav Havel's words) by being the example. This boils down to authencity. Another key element for Leaders to ensure is that the followers need to feel that they are becoming better persons under a particular leader!
on Jan 4, 2012