Project Management Leadership: Building Creative Teams, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10

Leadership vs. Management

Learning Outcomes

After reading this chapter you should be able to:

• Outline the project manager’s portfolio of skills.
• Distinguish between leadership skills and management skills.
• List the benefits of both leadership skills and management skills and appreciate when each is more important than the other.

Leaders and managers are frequently portrayed as different types of people, often at opposite ends of a skills continuum. A leader is portrayed as someone who inspires the team members to achieve, while a manager is portrayed as someone who is more concerned with planning and controlling the team members.

In reality, an effective manager of projects actually needs both project leadership skills and project management skills. This chapter will indicate that, although leadership and management might be different skills, they are also links in a chain. This might sound like a contradiction, but in practice the two skills are complementary because without project leadership you will have a directionless and unmotivated team, and without a project management system you will have planning chaos.

The term management is usually associated with words such as organizing, planning, monitoring and controlling. The term leadership brings to mind ideas of motivation, influencing and working with people. This distinction illuminates the essential difference between a person that might be labeled a manager and someone that would be called a leader. It ...