People and processes

Leadership is about people.

Management is about processes.

Those individuals that truly want to be successful and help themselves, their coworkers, employees and organization grow will use both.

Leadership is the ability to connect with people and influence them toward a central purpose. Leaders are present at multiple levels in and around organizations and teams and some leaders elevate their group while others bring it down.

Ideally, leaders work to improve and bring people up, but that is not always the case. Effective leaders hold high standards and their influence is to raise the bar for performance.

Managers seek to create systems and make things run more smoothly. They seek to understand what is the best way to accomplish a task and then create a system to do it that all the time. In this way, there is little energy wasted and things run smoothly. Unfortunately, this is assuming that there is one way to do things. Most of the time there are numerous ways of accomplishing tasks and the environment is always changing so that the process is evolving. Managers that seek input and are constantly striving to make things better will be successful.

Managers that seek to have operations run smoothly, elicit input from their people and work with them to achieve greatness are the most successful. These are the individuals who have blended their ability manage both their people and their processes.