When management and leadership are the same...

Over the last few decades, the scholarly world has spent great amount of time debating what leadership is, on how it should be defined, on what it entails, and on arguments that leadership and management is not the same thing (eg. Barker, Meindl, Alvesson... just to name a few). This is where I find it hard to understand, because the real world out there spends more time doing real work than engaging in such hair-splitting commentaries.

Management or leadership, more often than not is a function of the same person. In other words no manager can get away from the expectation of being a leader, similarly no leader can be expected not to manage some things. Perhaps only a handful out of billions of people are blessed with the luxury of having only to lead and not manage, no action but talk only. But the larger world out there sees management and leadership synonymously.

Some says: "Managers do the things right, leaders do the right things." But is it really the case? Are they mutually exclusive? In addition, this saying is fundamentally flawed because it seems to recognize only two kinds of people in this world, managers and leaders. Since many in this world either do things the right way, or do the right kind of things, does it then mean everyone is either a manager or a leader? If every human can simply be classified as either a manager or a leader, then we risk trivializing management and leadership studies, why then do scholars spend so much time arguing over their differences?

Supposing scholars can agree to a distinct difference between the two, developed some intellectually intriguing model of management and leadership, we also should create a new kind of drug such that when consumed, would allow one to switch personality and mental state at will in order to effectively get into one's management or leadership role at any given point of time. If personality traits are so deeply embedded in one's actions and behaviour, how does one act and behave differently when the situation calls for a managerial or a leadership act? Perhaps even prior to this, does a person consciously figure out if a situation calls for a managerial or a leadership act in the first place? More often than not, such responses are highly instinctive and completely subconscious. Managerial and leadership skills are tightly fused, separating them is as hard as ridding seeds from apples without cutting, and utilization of these skills are often as a whole rather than as parts; no one buys un-cut apples without seeds, do you? Some may argue that before eating it, we can cut and remove the seeds, analogous to removing managerial skills from a person. But until such time we find a suitable psychological knife to cut up a person's mental state, managerial and leadership skills remain fused as one.

So, where do we go from here? Management and leadership studies should be as one. Stop seeing them as different, study them together. Look at how each can complement the other to be effective, and vice versa. This I call it the Managerial-leader, or Leadership-manager.