Here is an excerpt from an article written by John O’Leary for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Business people and business theorists love to draw distinctions between management and leadership. They tell us that “managers do things right; leaders do the right thing” and “management is administration, but leadership is innovation.”

Management, we seem to think, is what we need to do, but leadership is what we want to do.

This is a conundrum that many of us describe, but is it real? Are leadership and management fundamentally different roles in practice? Or do they simply require us to focus on different things?

I recently had the opportunity to think about this topic from multiple perspectives, as part of the M.A. program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations at The University of Texas at Austin. My 34 years’ experience in multinational organizations and my studies led me to ask is there really any difference between leadership and management in the early 21st Century? And, if there is, where does it lie?

I studied eight leaders who came from business, government, and NCAA Division I sports. Collectively, they have 197 years of professional experience and have spent 139 years in leadership or management positions. I used a semi-structured interview technique that focused separately on leadership and management. After our conversations, I conducted a textual analysis of the transcripts using a framework of the concepts, behaviors and activities of leadership and management.

All of the interviewees described leadership as being different from management when asked a direct question at the end of the interview. The participants responded with differing degrees of emphasis — from “they’re different” to “absolutely” — but they clearly expressed the idea that leadership and management are separate, different concepts.

Yet these conversations also revealed a more nuanced distinction in the participants’ understanding of the actual, performative difference between leadership and management. Their responses about behaviors and activities indicate a difference of focus within a set of foundational elements that are common to both leadership and management.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

John O’Leary has observed and practiced leadership and management in the energy industry for over 30 years. His interests focus on the development of leadership skills, and their effective use, in large organizations.