Most of us recognise that Leadership and Management are two very different things, and that both are essential to the extraordinary enterprise, but how can we honestly appraise the prevailing balance in the businesses we lead ourselves?

Here are two simple but illuminating definitions to help your own evaluation:

Leadership: The art of getting a competent person to do what you know needs to be done because he/she wants to do it.

Management: The process of dealing with or controlling things or people to ensure good execution.

It is likely that the run of the mill enterprise has only one of these.

What characterises the company without clear leadership is a sense of confusion or uncertainty about “the mission”. The command and control micro manager is in charge here and in any organisation where the emphasis is on control rather than empowerment it won’t matter how many processes, checkpoints, targets or review mechanisms are put in place, the outcome will be the same; at best a functional business reactive to today’s needs with people doing what is demanded of them in their job description but little more.

Sure, management is critical to allocating roles and responsibilities, but if management exists in a vacuum no one will be able to lift their heads up to see if the horizon is getting nearer, because no one has set out a clear direction to look towards.

Leadership provides the focus for everyone’s emotional and intellectual engagement in your business and its goals. It strongly and visibly aligns everybody’s energies towards the future, providing a clear sense of direction and purpose and defining the framework for everyone to operate