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A Discussion On Leadership And Management

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The discussion of what actually compiles a leader is constantly a debate. The definitions of leaders, followers, and the characteristics that they each have are never the same between two people, which makes it a difficult topic to openly tackle. Once the conversation begins, one might have a solid stance on what he/she defines as leadership but as the conversation unfolds and more questions are asked, what he/she thought she knew can be completely turned upside down. It is the kind of topic that one could walk away from knowing less about his/her stance than when one came into the discussion. This is certainly what happened to me last week in our first discussion on leadership. It was clear to me when I left, but it because even clearer when I reevaluated the agree/disagree statements and saw that what I said at the beginning of the conversation was not the exact opposite in some of the cases. The first statement was “leadership and management are basically synonymous terms” which I originally agreed with, but after our discussion and reading the articles I switched my answer to disagree. When I first read the statement, I felt as though in order to do one successfully, you must be able to do both. That a leader must be able to manage people and a manager must be a leader. The words of John Kotter in the Harvard Business Review certainly made me look at the phrase with a new twist. He sums the two up at the very beginning by saying that they are two very different and

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