| Management | Leadership |
| is about coping with complexity | is about coping with change |
| their practises and procedures are largely a response to the emergence of large organizations | part of the reason it has become so important in recent years is that the business world has become more competitive and volatile. More change always demands more leadership |
| Companies manage complexity first by planning and budgeting, setting targets, establishing detailed steps for achieving these targets and then allocating resources to accomplish those plans. | Leading an organization to constructive change begins by setting a direction – developing a vision along with strategies for producing the change needed to achieve that vision. |
| Management develops the capacity to achieve its plan by organizing and staffing. Creating the organizational structure, the set of jobs for accomplishing plan requirements, staffing the jobs, communicating the plan, delegating responsibility for carrying out the plan and devising systems to monitor implementation. | The equivalent leadership activity is aligning people. This means communicating the new direction to those who can create coalitions that understand the vision and are committed to its achievement. |
| Management ensures plan accomplishment by controlling and problem solving. | For leadership, achieving a vision requires motivating and inspiring by appealing to basic but often untapped human needs, values and emotions. |
John Kotter über....
…setting a direction
Setting direction is never the same as planning. Planning is a management process, deductive in nature and designed to produce orderly results, not change. Setting a direction is more inductive. Leaders gather a broad range of data and look for patterns, relationships and linkages that help explain things. The direction-setting aspect of leadership doesn´t produce plans, it creates vision and strategies.
….Vision
What is crucial about a vision is not its originality but how well it serves the interests of important constituencies – customers, stockholders, employees – and how easily it can be translated into a realistic competitive strategy. Bad visions tend to ignore the legitimate needs of important constituencies or they are strategically unsound: when a company that has never been better than a weak competitor in an industry suddenly starts talking about becoming number one, that is a pipe dream not a vision. A competent direction setting process provides a focus in which planning can then be realistically carried out.
….Alignment
To executives who are overeducated in management and undereducated in leadership, the idea of getting people moving in the same direction appears to be an organizational problem. Alignment is more of a communications challenge then a design problem. It involves talking to many more individuals the organizing does. Anyone who can help implement the vision and strategies or who can block implementation is relevant. Another big challenge in leadership is credibility – getting people to believe the message.
Quelle: Harvard Business Review on Leadership, Harvard Business School Press, John P. Kotter: What Leaders really do, S. 37ff
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