Leadership : The Field Of Distance Education

Although the terms “management” and “leadership” are often confused as in meaning the same there is a distinction between the words. The distinction between the words is that people manage things and lead people (Collins, 2017).

Some theorists use the terms ‘leadership’ and ‘management’ reciprocally as if they are tantamount with one another, while others use them in a very purposeful sense to express that they are, in effect, rather different (Bush, 2003). Organisational successfulness, it is generally accepted, is dependant on both competent leadership and consistent management (Dimmock and Walker, 2005) According to Grace (1995) they do not follow from one or the other, but

Leadership at times can be a complex topic to delve into and may appear to be a simple and graspable concept for a certain few. Leadership skills are not simply acquired through position, seniority, pay scale, or the amount of titles an individual holds but is a characteristic acquired or is an innate trait for the fortunate few who possess it. Leadership can be misconstrued with management; a manager “manages” the daily operations of a company’s work while a leader envisions, influences, and empowers the individuals around them.

Much has been written about the difference between management and leadership. In the past, competent management staffs ran effective companies. In light of our ever-changing world, however, most companies have come to realize that it is much more important to lead than to manage. In today's world the old ways of management no longer work. One reason is that the degree of environmental and competitive change we are experiencing is extreme. Although exciting, the world is also very unstable and confused. In an article entitled What’s the Difference between Your Hospital and the Other? Gary Campbell states that the difference between a manager and a leader is that the manager “finds himself quite willing to

2b. The title of the book is The Distance Education Evolution: Issues and Case Studies.

One way to establish the difference between management and leadership is the fact that leadership is simply one of the many things that a manager should have. In fact, this should be one of the priorities of a manager. But aside from this, a manager also needs to be highly knowledgeable in administrative tasks, because this also comprises a huge part of their job. Specifically, a manager has four major functions to do: Planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. All these functions have been proven to be essential in any kind of management process, and serve as the main foundation of all organizations (Bateman & Snell, 2009).

During the first nine years of my military career, I spent the majority of my effort on learning how to fly airplanes and execute missions effectively and efficiently. It was during this time I completed my first two overseas deployments, and the opportunity to lead generally presented itself through one on one encounters with sailors or younger pilots. The only formal leadership training I received was very basic, and did not touch on leadership theory. My introduction to leadership education truly began when I enrolled in the United States Marine Corps Command and Staff College Distance Education Program (USMC CSCDEP). I finished the USMC CSC and began the Master of Arts in Administrative Leadership (MAAL) program shortly after beginning my first true leadership position in the Navy. Assigned as the Assistant Officer in Charge to a forward deployed detachment of C-2 Greyhound aircraft in Atsugi, Japan, I quickly began to apply many of the concepts I studied during CSC. I was very junior in rank to be in an executive leadership position, because our unit was smaller than the others in the Carrier Air Wing. The detachment was part of a larger Air Wing, comprised of six other squadrons, all with Commanders and Executive Officers with a higher rank, and more experience than that of myself and the Officer in Charge of our unit. The Air Wing commander, however, realized that the leadership positions came with the same demands as any other command position, and therefore

In today’s business world employees, industries, and consumers look toward company leaders like Steve Jobs (Former Apple CEO), Anne Mulcahy (Former Xerox CEO), Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO), Elon Musk (Former PayPal CEO), and Eric Schmidt (Goggle CEO) to understand the dynamic roles of leadership and management. These two allusive terms have inspired a great deal of conversation, articles, and books full of material about their true meanings. These two words have also inspired the academic world to create core and major courses in an effort to help future managers and leaders plan, organize, and lead. But what does Leadership or Management really mean and are the terms related?

Leadership and management go hand in hand but is not the same thing, but are linked and compliment each other.

Management and leadership are viewed as two different perspectives in the business environment. As described by Dr. Warren Bennis ‘Managers are people who do things right, while leaders are people who do the right thing’, this means that managers do things by the set rules and follow company policy, while leaders follow their own intuition, which may in turn be of more benefit to the company.

Good leadership is necessary for organizations to be successful, but particularly for Distance Education (DE) good leadership is essential for the field to continue to bring educational opportunities to people who would otherwise be unable to obtain an education. To do this, leaders must be prepared to deal with the many challenges DE must address and have the ambition to lead their teams to achieve the needs of the organization.

Pepicello’s ideas and philosophies about distance education were stimulating and thought-provoking. While he did not necessarily know that higher education was where he wanted to spend his career, it was his passion, so he followed it (Pepicello, personal communication, June 22, 2016). Eventually, he would cross paths with John Sperling, the founder of UoP, who he considers a visionary and his most influential leader and mentor: “He took me from a doubter to one of the most vigorous proponents of distance education in the country” (Personal communication, June 19, 2016). Pepicello’s passion for higher education and his eventual passion for distance education, then, guided

Leadership is about inspiring the confidence and support of people needed to achieve organisational goals, a dynamic relationship between leaders and group members and the facilitation of contribution (DuBrin 2016, p. 3: McShane and Von Glinow 2013, p.351). Kotter (1992, p. 102) draws a distinction between management and leadership, saying the former deals with getting things done while the latter decides what to do and why, but in practice they overlap and complement each other.

The concepts of leadership and management are often viewed in different ways with different theories and schools of thought regarding the meaning of these terms (Gold, Thorpe and Mumford, 2010). Management and leadership can be defined individually and encompass different roles and attributes, however, both management and

The relation between leadership and management has for a longtime influenced how organizations are perceived. It has also contributed to maintain some type of confusion in education and within the organization itself.