Leadership for Intelligence Professionals   

How and Why the “Distinction” Between Management and Leadership

Came to be Made

One Short Version, One Longer, Historical Perspective

The Short Version

Written by David K. Hurst, Visiting Fellow Center for Creative Leadership.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the word “management” encompassed everything from administration to leadership.  With the rise in prestige of business schools, however, the meaning of the word changed.  In part because of a burgeoning consultant industry, “management” came to be identified with a rational, analytical activity that relied on calculation and technique to enhance the performance of organizations.  In the 1970s, in the aftermath of multiple failures by business and government that used those techniques, many people began to question whether management and leadership were the same activity.  Today, although the terminology varies, people seem to agree that there are at least two distinct approaches at work in organizations:  The first is based on a technical or transactional logic taught in most business schools.  The second is rooted in the social, transformational logic of creative leadership that is best learned through experience.

The Long, Historical Perspective

Background

Historically, leadership—at its simplest; the ability to cause people to follow one and to achieve something desired—was exercised by those who were “born to the purple”—Kings who led the nation, Nobles who led the Armies, or scions of great families who led the Church based on their God-given exulted station, their feudal rights and the inspiring persona created around them.  Or leadership was based on the “charisma”—a “gift from God”— shown by the inspiring actions of heroes, the stirring words of revolutionaries or the sacrificial examples of saints.  Essentially, leadership was something naturally inherent in the person’s being, character and traits. 

Meanwhile, there were other people who managed the finances of the nation, the equipping of the armies, the estates of the nobles, and the monasteries of the church.  Others managed the slaves, servants or workers who toiled on their farms, ships, workshops and counting houses.  Management was based on the authority and power granted to managers by their overlords, landlords and financial sponsors as well as the managers own planning, organizing, controlling and directing skills.

It was not until the 18th century revolutions brought the concept of individual freedom and introduced constitutional monarchies and parliaments and were followed by the beginnings of the industrial revolution and large scale manufacturing with its need for numbers of skilled people, that those people who were “born to the purple”, but now dependent upon taxation and industry as the basis for their national power and wealth, came to realize how important management was.  Likewise, those managers conducting the activities of the government by spending the funds allotted by parliament, those managing recruiting and training of the armies or the employment and work of people on farms, ships and factories began to realize that authority and power were not enough to cause free men to follow them to achieve what they desired. As industry became more important as the basis for national and personal wealth during the 19th century, it became clear that, without total authority and power, managers required something additional to supplement their skills of planning, organizing, directing and controlling to assure that the organization was productive.  Those managing plantations worked by slaves tried whips, those managing shipping lines tried impressments, those managing factories tried women as a supplement to men.

Management Becomes a Science

As governments and industry grew, management began to be formally recognized as a discipline in the late 19th century with the first articles appearing in English journals and the creation of business schools in America—Wharton in 1881 and Chicago in 1898.  In 1911, Frederick W. Taylor wrote the first widely accepted management text Principles of Scientific Management and the modern discipline of management was born.  Given the need for managers to plan, organize, direct and control but without total power, two schools of management theory and research began to evolve.  An organizational school of practical managers and consultants emphasized the former, by developing and, first, introducing new ideas for increasing the efficiency and productivity of employees such as time study, supervisory ratios, and periodic evaluations followed, later, by new concepts for planning and organizing by the managers themselves.  A behavioral school sociologists focused on ways to increase the efficiency and productivity of workers by  meeting their basic needs—in terms of, at least: working hours, working conditions, pay—to motivate them to follow and achieve something desired.  Power and authority were replaced by incentives to motivate people.

By 1938, a senior Bell Telephone executive, Chester Barnard, wrote The Function of the Executive. He emphasized that, at least at the executive level, the most important functions of a manager were strategic planning and the need to take steps so that the employees would accept the authority of the executive and be willing accept direction.  For its time, this was the closest explanation of what is today considered the functions of a leader.  Unfortunately, the impact of that book was overshadowed by the coming war, which required the application of mathematics, systems theory and operations research to management problems and strengthened scientific management by the creation of a quantitative school.

Meanwhile, the concept of the born leader or natural leader or the idea that leadership was something naturally inherent in the person’s being, character and traits continued to be accepted, right up to the war.  For example, generals MacArthur, Patton, Montgomery and others created a leadership persona as part of the basis for inspiring their subordinates.  Others were seen as naturally inspiring.  James Bradley describing Sgt Mike Stark of Easy Company who was killed on Iwo Jima said in Flags of Our Fathers’; “Everybody idolized Mike.  He was a born leader, a natural leader, a leader by example.”

The Post-War Era

But, the belief that leadership was a result of certain inherent personal gifts or traits first seriously came into question as a result of the War.  When expanding from a small peacetime to a large wartime force, the U.S. Army trained thousands of men to be leaders of squads, platoons, companies and battalions. To help them after training, Colonel Edward L. Munson wrote the manual: Leadership for American Army Leaders.  The performance of these men in combat was testimony to the idea that it is possible to become a leader by training, guidance, and on-the-job experience.  Likewise the belief was questioned in the academic world in 1948, when an early leadership theorist, Ralph Stogdill, reviewed leadership studies from 1933 through 1947 “bearing on the problem of traits and personal factors associated with leadership”. As a result of his work, published as “Personal Factors Associated with Leadership” in the Journal of Psychology. (Also found in J. Thomas Wren, The Leader’s Companion, as Chapter 23.)  He found that:

...leadership is not a matter...of the mere possession of some combination of traits.

A person does not become a leader by virtue of the possession of some combination of traits….

The qualities, characteristics, and skills required in a leader are determined to a large extent by the demands of the situation in which he is to function as a Leader.

Meanwhile, in 1947, Herbert A. Simon had published Administrative Behavior, a text which synthesized behavioral aspects into the process of management and gave the behavioral school increased visibility in the discipline of management.

Thus, a flood of research in the behavioral school was unleashed in the 1950s and 1960s. (Montgomery Van Wart summarizes much of that research in Dynamics of Leadership in Public Service: Theory and Practice, Chapter 10, “Leadership Theories: Early Managerial and Transactional Approaches” pages 305-326.)  Based on the idea that people could be trained to exercise leadership, many researchers focused on identifying all the traits or characteristics that a manager might need to acquire to influence or motivate employees.   Others focused on the behavior of managers, the behavior of employees and the interaction of manager and employee behavior for varying contingencies or in differing situations.  Overall, the search was for the best or the most useful traits, behaviors or concepts and techniques of manager-employee relationships that a manager could adopt to motivate employees. 

While, by the 1970s, that behavioral research had yet to fully penetrate into the practical world of management, organizations  had begun declaring that “employees are our most important resource” and began trying pay-for-performance schemes, bonuses, guaranteed employment, improved pensions and other steps to motivate workers to higher productivity.

(The history of management from its earliest days through the 1960s can be accessed at:

 http://ollie.dcccd.edu/mgmt1374/book_contents/1overview/management_history/mgmt_history.htm )

The Failure of Management

But, in the 1970s, it became apparent that all that the well-developed concept of scientific and motivational incentives was not working.  Not at the national level and not at the business level. 

At the national level, on the domestic economic front, because of the administration’s inability to combat the affects of the earlier OPEC induced energy crisis, the U.S. economy was in a period of stagflation with GDP growth of less than 1% and the prime interest rate at 21%.  In terms of national security the U.S. lost influence in the mid-east, the Soviet Union gained control over Afghanistan, and there was a widely perceived growth of Soviet military power.  Meanwhile, U.S. military power, was weakened and disheartened by the forced withdrawal from Vietnam  and, as was shown by the failure of Desert One, had not fully recovered.  In the Intelligence Community the Senate and House Investigative Committees under Senator Frank Church and Representative Otis Pike found multiple ethical and management problems in intelligence organizations.  This all combined to create a sense of pessimism within the U.S., which in a speech on July 15, 1979, President Jimmy Carter spoke of as a national “crisis of confidence”.  Although he did not use the words, this came to be known as his “malaise” speech.

Likewise, U.S. industry and business seemed to be failing to compete on a world-wide scale.  New innovative products were not being developed and, therefore, U.S. corporations were losing business to Japanese and other foreign competition. “Buy America” campaigns and corporate bailouts, such as given to Chrysler, were failing to revitalize U.S. industry.  Japanese and foreign investors were buying prestige U.S. golf courses, skyscrapers and companies.

It became widely recognized that the U.S. government, military and businesses were going to have to change if they were to improve their performance and regain their former vitality. The nation, its national security organizations and businesses had to be motivated and, indeed, inspired to recognize and, indeed, embrace the reality that the international economic and security environment had changed and to accept that changes were needed in the way the U.S. responded to economic, national security and business competition.

But, scientific and incentive-based organizational management was intended primarily to maintain stability within organizations; stability of production and efficiency through standardized processes and stability of workforce through good pay and benefits and stability of budgets or profits through incremental planning.  It encouraged steady but incremental management improvements through research, testing and adoption of new concepts and techniques of planning, organizing, directing and controlling.  Clearly something more was needed.  Thus, the urgent need for change at the national level and at the business level was the impetus for several ground-breaking books. 

Calls for Leadership

First of all, in 1977, Abraham Zaleznick wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review asking “Managers and Leaders: Are the Different” and his answer was a resounding “yes”.  Zaleznik argued that managers and leaders are psychologically different personalities and that leaders have much more in common with artists, scientists, and other creative thinkers than they do with managers.  He  pointed out that while managers focused on competence, control and power, leaders provided on inspiration, vision and human passion.  He emphasized the need to develop both kinds of people for an organization. As the Harvard Business Review subsequently pointed out: “The piece caused an uproar in business schools. The study of leadership hasn’t been the same since.”

In 1977, concerned with the “urgent problems of the day”, Robert Greenleaf wrote Servant Leadership.  Benefiting from much of the behavioral research done during the 1950s and 1960s, Greenleaf emphasized that rather than managers trying to motivate people by focusing on incentives which met their basic needs, what was needed was a Servant-Leader “first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served.”  Clearly, the focus of leadership should be on the needs of the people, but not simply their basic needs to motivate them for the benefit of the manager, but their higher personal and professional needs to inspire them to achieve for themselves.  By so doing their efforts would also benefit the organization.  Leadership should focus on people.

In 1978, historian and presidential scholar James MacGregor Burns wrote Transforming Leadership.  Burns described three types of leadership: the heroic leadership of the distant past, the incentive-based motivational research of the recent past, which he called “transactional” leadership, and a new kind of “transforming” leadership.  Burns believed,   as he wrote then, that transforming leadership was required at the national level and that national leaders should

 “…engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality....their purposes become fused...as mutual support for a common purpose....

As he wrote later, that by the word “transforming” he didn’t mean just “change”.  He said:

...to transform something cuts more profoundly. It is to cause a metamorphosis in form or structure, a change in the very condition of the thing, a change into another substance, a radical change in outward form or inner character….It is the change of this breadth and depth that is fostered by transforming leadership.

Thus, what soon came to be called “transformational” leadership was understood to mean dramatic change in organizations.  Leadership would focus on change.

Just as Zaleznik emphasized the need for the development for leaders, Burns called for the development of a “school of leadership” with “standards for assessing past, present and potential leaders”.

Thus, with a these calls for developing leaders and with an understanding that the focus of leadership should be on inspiring people and bringing about change, by the mid-1980s there was a surge of books on leadership, differentiating it from management and, thus, constituting a virtual school of leadership.  It is those books that can be found listed as “Leadership Classics” on the book list for this course and which provide the starting point for the course itself.  Some of them are:

- Paul Hersey, The Situational Leader: The Other 59 Minutes;  1984.

- Bernard Bass, Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectation; 1985.

- Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge; 1985.

-Kenneth H. Blanchard and Drea Zigarmi, Leadership and the One Minute Manager: Increasing

 Effectiveness Through Situational Leadership;1985. 

-Harlan Clevland, The Knowledge Executive: Leadership in an Information Society;1985.

 -Thomas J. Peters and Nancy K. Austin, A Passion for Excellence: The Leadership Difference; 1985.

 -James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, The Leadership Challenge, How to Get Extraordinary Things

  Done in Organizations; 1987.

-Warren Bennis, On Becoming a Leader; 1989.

-Max DePree, Leadership is an Art; 1989.

- Abraham Zaleznik, The Managerial Mystique: Restoring Leadership in Business; 1989.

-John W. Gardner, On Leadership; 1990.

- John P. Kotter, A Force for Change; How Leadership Differs From Management; 1990

The Result: Distinction but Not Equality

Increasingly leadership began to be recognized as a distinct and important function that needed to be performed in an organization.  For example: W. Edwards Deming; when introducing the concept of Total Quality Management, in his books Out of the Crisis in 1986 and, especially, The New Economics for Industry, Government, and Education in 1993, which included the “System of Profound Knowledge” and the “Fourteen Points for Management;  said:

To successfully respond to the myriad of changes that shake the world, transformation to a new style of management is required.  The route to take is what I call profound knowledge—Knowledge for the leadership of transformation.

He urged managers to “Adopt the new philosophy…awaken to the challenge…and take on leadership for change.”  And, when listing his fourteen key principles for management—The Fourteen Points—he urged supervisors to “Institute Leadership” to facilitate the work of the people of the organization and told corporate managers to “abolish annual or merit ratings and management by objective” and “substitute leadership”. 

Likewise, by 1988, Desmond Martin and Richard Shell when writing their book Managing Professionals: Insights for Increasing Cooperation, said “…by definition, leadership is an important part of management” and devoted half the book to discussing management and half the book to discussing leadership.