Leadership and Management essay

Traditionally, concepts of management and leadership were distinguished and separated from one another. As a result, the traditional view on management and leadership was shaped on the basis of such separation of these two concepts. However, in the contemporary business environment, the separation of concepts of management and leadership is apparently erroneous, especially in the context of the project management. Consequently, the traditional view on management and leadership is out-of-date and contemporary leaders should have managerial skills, while managers should be able to become efficient leaders to head their organizations to success and accomplish projects successfully. At the same time, such a combination of leadership and managerial qualities is not always possible because managers cannot always be leaders, but, being granted with the formal authority, they may attempt to perform the role of leaders. The latter may lead to internal conflicts within an organization or a team working on a project because of the conflict between the formal leader and informal one. In such a situation, setting up a formal program or project management office should focus on the efficient combination of leadership and managerial skills of managers of the project, but it is practically impossible to impose the formal leadership on an organization or a team, if there is a strong informal leader, who opposes to the manager, who performs the role of a formal leader.

On analyzing the contemporary business environment, it is necessary to take into consideration the increased significance of the project management, which turns out to be a crucial factor in the development of modern organization. In actuality, the development of the project management, to a significant extent, defines the efficacy of the organizational performance, especially in regard to organizations operating in the field of knowledge-based industries. The technological progress and qualitative changes in the modern society raise the problem of the larger flexibility of modern organization compared to the past, when organizations could perform successfully being narrowly specialized. In stark contrast, modern organizations need to be flexible and adapt faster to the changing business environment than they used to do in the past. The reason is the technological progress and the emergence of consumerist society which stimulate the wider introduction of innovation and fast change of the business environment. As a result, companies need to change respectively to changes in their business environment.

Naturally, in such a context, the project management become of the utmost importance because the project management includes planning, organizing and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of the specific project goals and objectives (Viadrot, 2002). In such a way, the project management becomes an efficient with the help of which organizations can meet their specific goals and objectives which are based on the current needs of organizations and their business environment. Therefore, the more efficiently the project management is applied the more successful is the organizational performance.

It proves beyond a doubt that the successful performance and project management highly depends on human resources and this is exactly where management and leadership become particularly important. At the same time, it is obvious that management and leadership the overall success of the project management. In fact, the efficient management and leadership stimulates employees’ to the development of innovations and applications of new methods and approaches to their work (Schmitt, B. and Simonson, 1997). As a result, the efficiency and productivity of wok increases while project’s goals and objectives are accomplished successfully because employees apply innovations and their creativity to meet the aforementioned goals and objectives, while they do not need the permanent supervision from the part of managers and leaders.

At this point, it is obvious that modern management and leadership should be primarily focused on human resource management because human resources turn out to be crucial for the project management. Projects cannot be carried out without properly managed human resources. In such a context, the project management implies the high level of professionalism of managers because they have to be able to manage employees and projects efficiently (Wetherbe, 1996). But, in the contemporary business environment, efficient management is not enough for the overall success of the project management as well as human resource management. The modern management has to be backed up with the strong leadership.

In actuality, managers cannot succeed if they are unable to lead their team or organization to the accomplishment of the project’s goals and objectives. In such a context, managerial skills are not enough because employees do need an efficient motivation and stimuli to work hard on the project. In addition, it is important to take into consideration another important factor – the risk of the internal conflicts because of the existence of informal leadership within a team or organization.

At this point, it is worth mentioning the fact that the presence of informal leaders in an organization or team may be a serious problem even for the most professional and successful manager, if he or she lacks leadership qualities. What is meant here is the fact that a manager, who is deprived of leadership qualities, cannot unite people and lead them to the accomplishment of the project’s goals and objectives (Sim, KL and Killough, 1998). What employees do need in such a situation is a strong, charismatic leader, who is able to inspire employees and stimulate them to work together for the common goals and objectives, even though material rewards may be insignificant. In this regard, it is worth mentioning the fact that, in the past, material rewards used to be considered the major motivators, while today, the moral, spiritual motivation becomes equally important to material motivation. This is where the mix of leadership and managerial qualities is particularly important since leaders are more successful in non-material motivation of employees than managers who mainly use material instruments of motivation.

At the same time, the problem of opposition or informal leadership in a team or organization working on the project is a serious challenge for a manager. The manager needs to persuade people to accomplish the goals defined in the project and he or she needs to keep them working efficiently until the project is accomplished. Often, employees do not understand the overall goal of objective of the project or they are not motivated that raises the opposition to the formal leader and informal leader takes the leading position in an organization. In such a context, the creation of a formal program or project management office cannot be an efficient solution of the problem, because if a manager, who is a formal leader, does not have leadership qualities, he or she will unable to cope with the informal leader. In such a situation, the elimination of barriers between informal and formal leader is more efficient. The latter can be achieved through the efficient combination of management and leadership, including the work of a manager with the informal leader to elaborate common strategy to meet the project’s goals and objectives.

Thus, in conclusion, it is possible to stress the importance of the combination of management and leadership in the contemporary business environment at large and in the project management in particular.