50MINUTES - Effective Leadership: Tips to motivate and inspire your team members

Often confused, some clarification between the roles of a leader and a manager is necessary. The distinction between management and leadership was established, among others, by Abraham Zaleznik (1976) and John P. Kotter (1999). What do these two authors state?

• Management is the use of authority to manage resources and constraints in order to produce goods or services. The manager will therefore use their formal authority, authority given to them by their superiors and confirmed in their job description: their superiors have entrusted them to perform certain tasks. The manager manages, organises and controls complexity. They translate problems into solutions. They plan and manage their team according to short and medium-term logic. They have a functional role in the operation. When considering how to proceed, a manager usually starts by asking How?.
• On the other hand, leadership is the ability to exert influence to achieve goals. A leader is able to inspire their employees to adhere to an idea or a project, mobilising them to achieve set objectives. They have a long-term outlook that they share and around which they construct their team. A leader seeks answers to questions that often begin with Why?.

Providing leadership therefore corresponds to a more emotional approach than management. A leader motivates their employees by creating a sense of belonging and showing gratitude. They also manage change with skill when dealing with uncertainties. Their actions become shining examples and inspire employees to believe in them and in themselves. A leader translates things by finding meaning and coherence. They make you want to follow them because they inspire trust.

Nevertheless, the distinction between a manager and a leader is rather tenuous. Great leaders naturally overlap their managerial skills and their leadership qualities. They cannot isolate one from the other.

Instead of the term leadership, I prefer something like director that connects the concepts related to influence, relationships, listening, authority, confidence, creativity, the alignment of actions and words, the meaning of a team, action, decision and reflection.
Therefore, distinguishing between the words leader and manager seems pointless to me. As a warship commander engaged for weeks in international crisis areas, I learned to lead, or in other words, to control in the heat of the moment, when time leaves no room for dialogue, and to manage in the interval time for the preparation and development of the solidarity of the army. It is primarily the context of space-time that must ultimately guide a potential leader in his action. Admiral Olivier Lajous, Former HRD in the French Navy

A person with great leadership skills will flourish more in a corporate environment that leaves a wide space for creativity.

Leadership can indeed hardly be exercised in a highly Taylorised organisation, where work is divided, tasks are simple and repetitive, and employees are supervised by a manager of coercive power within a very directive system. Decision-making power is centralised at the top of the hierarchy, leaving little room for initiative. Although line work symbolises this type of business, there are many leaders who still operate Taylorism in their professional practices, both in the industrial and commercial sectors of administration.

Conversely, start-ups and companies that are known as flexible or liberal (Getz, 2012) evolve by being aware of instability and quickly find innovative responses. In this type of model, corporate culture values initiative and innovation. Leadership is collaborative and is shared in true independent teams with the values and purpose of the organisation.

Of course, these two models are complete opposites, and there are a vast majority of organisations where leadership is expressed in a diversified manner. A leader has an interest in finding a place where creativity and latitude are equally offered.