Although leadership and management seem to mean the same concept, there are the most obvious differences. Is a good manager always a good leader? Entrepreneur and business life coach Mohab Ayoub shares the answers and his life-long experience.

Leadership has been one of the most popular topics in the business for the last 20 years. What is leadership and what is not? How is it different from management? Which leadership style should be adopted? While leadership, which is the subject of many fields such as sociology, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, is glorified as a rank; I observe that the title of manager is seen as being despised or underestimated.

Manager is the title of the person who manages the business because of his/her role. Leadership is the attitude and competence of the same person. These two concepts do not describe different people. Leadership, coaching and mentoring are different words Executive; situationally, he/she switches between these titles periodically, sometimes wearing several of these names at the same time.

The word “manager”, which has been in English since 1560, is derived from the verb “to manage”. It has been used with the meaning of "horse trainer" in Italian, and since the beginning of the 1700s, it has been used to mean "the person who manages the business".

It is interesting that the word "manager", which corresponds to "to manage", also carries the meanings of condoning and covering up. For example; As in the sentence "You are old, what happens if you manage it". When we look at the root of leadership, we see that it comes from an Anglo-Saxon, old English word "loedan, lithan", that is, to travel. In this sense, “leadership” is a “journey” just like the meaning of its origins.

The leader is the person who leads the transformation journey.

Among the necessary and important characteristics of the leader; inspiring, seeing the big picture, creating value, generating strategy, innovation, having a dream for the future and uniting people around this purpose. With these characteristics, the leader arouses admiration in other people.

However, if he/she cannot manage the business and people, having leadership qualities alone is not enough for success. It needs to control processes and people, monitor the efficiency of resources and make decisions. Otherwise, the leadership qualities will remain empty. When a person is only a manager, he or she can be a status quo, task-oriented, short-term thinker, and go through a work list.

The mind is not a substitute for the heart, the heart for the mind; they are not interchangeable. If we consider the mind sacred and forget the heart, the soul will die. Even if we regard the heart as sacred and ignore the mind, we have difficulties in exhibiting life practices (working, producing, making decisions, etc.) at the level we aim for. The same is true for leadership and management. If the leader does not remove the obstacles to completing the work list by saying, "Let me be a servant leader and meet the needs and expectations of people"; It cannot reveal its existence holistically, it cannot achieve success, it cannot carry the organization to where it wants to go.

Warren Bennis, one of the pioneers of contemporary leadership studies was fond of saying, “The manager does things right; the leader does the right thing..” Organizations also need managers who do the job and perform it correctly.

It also needs managers who are leaders to choose what to do for their role and use their own productivity at the right place and time.