1 Management is not leadership

Figure 2 Management can make organisations run seamlessly, but should not be confused with leadership

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This is a photograph of a man standing and demonstrating something to colleagues who are seated around a table.

Figure 2 Management can make organisations run seamlessly, but should not be confused with leadership

Keith Grint (2005) provides a framework for helping us understand what leadership is not. First, leadership is not management. Grint says that management involves running organisations through routines and standardising processes. A management approach sees a problem, such as low exam results in a school, and applies an agreed set of practices to address the problem, such as a particular approach to teaching that can be standardised. Under a management approach, targets are agreed and performance evaluated against results. As Grint states, management can be extremely technically sophisticated, and it often needs to be, because its ultimate aim is to ‘tame’ problems to such an extent that we often forget that they were ever problems in the first place.