Business Bartleby
商业板块  巴托比专栏
Managers v leaders
管理者vs领导者
A distinction that is both valid and unhelpful.
一种既有效又无益的区分。

If you were asked to imagine a manager, you might well conjure up someone comically boring, desk-bound and monotonal. Now do the same for a leader. You may well be picturing someone delivering a rousing speech. A horse may be involved. You almost certainly have different types in mind. There is indeed a distinction between managers and leaders, but it should not be overdone.
如果让你想象一个管理者的样子，你很可能会联想到一个无聊透顶、伏案工作的、单调乏味的人。现在，让你想象一位领导者。你很可能会想象一个人正在发表振奋人心的演讲。还可能会想到一匹马。你脑子里肯定有关于领导不同的类型。管理者和领导者之间确实有区别，但不应过分区分。

Various attempts have been made to pin down the differences between the two, but they boil down to the same thing. Managers, according to an influential article by Abraham Zaleznik in the Harvard Business Review in 1977, value order; leaders are tolerant of chaos. A later article in the same publication, by John Kotter, described management as a problem-solving discipline, in which planning and budgeting creates predictability. Leadership, in contrast, is about the embrace of change and inspiring people to brave the unknown. Warren Bennis, an American academic who made leadership studies respectable, reckoned that a manager administers and a leader innovates.
人们曾多次尝试明确两者之间的差异，但归根结底都是一样的。亚伯拉罕·扎莱兹尼克于 1977 年在《哈佛商业评论》上发表了一篇颇具影响力的文章，称管理者重视秩序，而领导者则容忍混乱。约翰·科特后来在同一刊物上发表的一篇文章将管理描述为一门解决问题的学科，其中计划和预算创造了可预测性。相比之下，领导力则是拥抱变化，激励人们勇敢面对未知。让领导力研究备受瞩目的美国学者沃伦·本尼斯认为，管理者负责管理，而领导者则负责创新。

Some of these definitions might be a tad arbitrary but they can be useful nonetheless. Too many firms promote employees into management roles because that is the only way for them to get on in their careers. But some people are much more suited to the ethos of management. They are more focused on process; they like the idea of spreadsheets, orderliness and supporting others to do good work. Shopify, an e-commerce firm, has created separate career paths for managers and developers with these differences in motivation in mind.
其中有些定义可能有些武断，但还是很有用的。有太多公司将员工提拔到管理岗位，因为这是他们职业发展的唯一途径。但有些人更适合管理的精神。他们更注重流程；他们喜欢电子表格、井然有序和支持他人做好工作。电子商务公司Shopify就考虑到了这些动机上的差异，为管理人员和开发人员创建了不同的职业发展路径。

The difference between managing and leading is not just a matter of semantics. Research by Oriana Bandiera of the London School of Economics and her co-authors looked at the diaries of 1,114 CEOs in six countries, and categorised their behaviours into two types. On their definitions, "leaders" have more meetings with other C-suite executives, and more interactions with multiple people inside and outside the company. "Managers" spend more time with employees involved in operational activities and have more one-to-one meetings. Leaders communicate and co-ordinate; managers drill downwards and focus on individuals. The research suggested that firms that are run by leaders perform better than those run by managers.
管理和领导之间的区别不仅仅是语义问题。伦敦政治经济学院的奥丽安娜·班迪埃拉和她的合著者研究了六个国家的1,114位首席执行官的日记，并将他们的行为分为两种类型。根据他们的定义，“领导者”与其他高管有更多的会议，以及与公司内外的多人有更多的互动。

But pointing to the differences between managers and leaders can also be unhelpful, for two reasons. The first is that being a leader seems so much sexier than being a manager. That is partly because leadership qualities are associated with seniority. As people scale the corporate ladder, they go on leadership courses, join leadership teams and start sentences with phrases like "as a leader". It is also because the two archetypes are not created equal. Would you rather be the person who likes to do budgeting or the one who holds others in thrall? The type that likes the status quo or the one that wants to change the world? "It takes neither genius nor heroism to be a manager," wrote Zaleznik. No wonder there are feted programmes for young global leaders but not for young global managers.

The capacity to inspire others and to head into uncharted waters does become more salient the higher you rise. But management skill does not become less important. Dr Bandiera and colleagues concluded that although CEOs who displayed the behaviour of leaders were associated with better company performance overall, different firms may require different types of boss. Some would be better off with "manager" CEOs. And performance is independently correlated with other things, including the quality of management practices.

The second unhelpful by-product of the debate about managers and leaders is that it tends to separate people into one camp or the other. In fact, bosses must combine the qualities of both. Just as it is hard to motivate people if you are highly efficient but have the inspirational qualities of feta cheese, so it is not much use laying out ambitious visions for the future if you don't have a clue how to make them reality. You need to turn the dial back and forth-from strategy to execution, change to order, passion to process, leader to manager.

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