The essentials of good team management

Management and leadership are not the same thing, and it takes careful consideration to be effective at both, explains Dr Richard Alston.

Many people confuse leadership with management, yet the two are very different. In a simple way, management is about planning, organisation, directing, controlling and coordinating. The activities of management concern not only the people in the organisation and its teams but the physical aspects of it as well, plant, equipment, materials, and money. The team manager's job is to blend these diverse assets together to form an organisation moving - more or less together - toward a commonly defined objective.

Leadership, however, is a management tool for influencing the people in an organisation, influencing the way people behave. Therefore, management is a much broader function dealing with the co-ordination and direction of things as well as people, toward the attainment of given objectives. A good leader may not be a good manager, though a good manager will probably be a good leader.

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