Course:            Leadership
Professor:            Dr. John Yang
Student:            Anita Yang (2004PT192)
Date:                December 23, 2005
Case:                Managers and Leaders Are They Different
Review on “Managers and Leaders”
    Mr. Abraham Zaleznik argues the traditional view of management, which omitted the essential leadership elements of inspiration, vision, and human passion that drive corporate success. He compares the personality difference between managers and leader, and analyzes on leader’s development in an organization.
Managers versus Leaders
    General speaking, A manager is a problem solver. Managers embrace process, seek stability and control and instinctively try to resolve problems quickly even without fully understand a problem’s significance. It takes neither genius nor heroism to be a manager, but rather persistence, though-mindedness, hard work, intelligence, analytical ability, and perhaps most important, tolerance and good will. However, Leaders are more in common with artists, scientists, and other creative thinkers than they do with managers. Leaders, in contrast, tolerate chaos and lack of structure and are willing to delay closure in order to understand the issues more fully. From this perspective, leadership is simply a practical effort to direct affairs, and to fulfill his or her task. Let’s uncover the mystical veil of leaders from the following aspects:
● Attitudes Toward Goals
Managers tend to adopt impersonal, if not passive, attitudes toward goals. In contrast, Leaders adopt a personal and active attitude toward goals who are active instead of reactiv
e, shaping ideas instead of responding to them. The net result of a leader’s influence changes the way people think about what is desirable, possible, and necessary.
● Conceptions of Work
reactive substanceManagers tend to view work as an enabling process involving some combination of people and ideas interacting to establish strategies and make decisions. To get people to accept solutions to problems, manager aim to shift balance of power and opposing views. However, Leaders work in the opposite direction. Where managers act to limit choices, leaders develop fresh approaches to long-standing problems and open issues to new options. To be effective, leaders must project their ideas onto images that excite people and only then develop choices that give those images substance. Leaders work from high-risk positions; indeed, they are often temperamentally disposed to seek out risk and danger, especially where the chance of opportunity and reward appears promising. From Mr.Zaleznik’s observations, the reason one individual seeks risks while another approaches problems conservatively depends more on his or her personality and less on conscious cho
ice. For those who become managers, a survival instinct dominates the need for risk, and with that instinct comes an ability to tolerate mundane, practical work. Leaders sometimes react to mundane work as to an affliction.
● Relations with Others
Managers prefer to work with people, who avoid solitary activity, in stead, they’re reconciling differences, seeking compromises, and establishing a balance of power. They strive to convert win-lose problem into a win-win situation. But such tactics focus on the decision-making process itself, and that process interests mangers rather than leaders. In fact, leaders are concerned with ideas, relate in more intuitive and empathetic ways. Leaders attract strong feelings of identity and difference or of love and hate. Human relations in leader-dominated structures often appear turbulent , intense, and at times even disorganized.
● Senses of Self
A sense of belonging or of being separate has a practical significance for managers and leaders. Managers see themselves as conservators and regulators of an existing order of affairs with which they personally identify and from which they gain rewards. A manager’s sense of self-worth is enhanced by perpetuating and strengthening existing institutions. Leaders, instead of once-born, tend to be twice-born personalities, people who feel separate from their environment. They may work in organizations, but they never belong to them.
Leaders Are Born or Made
    Some people believe that leaders are born, while others believe that life experiences mold the individual, that no one is born a leader. My opinion is that “leaders are both born and made”.
Leaders are partly “born” since there is a genetic component to intelligence, the natural talents or characteristics may offer certain advantages and play some parts to make an individual becoming a leader. But every leader is also partly “made”. For example, they mu
st gathered certain requisite experiences, master necessary knowledge and skills, etc.
We’re fortunate because we’re living in modern time, practicing under advanced managerial system, as well as more and more business organizations adopt scientific and systematic process to provide opportunity for leaders and to develop potential leaders becoming really qualified leaders.

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