Test Drive test drive | Page 18

Business leaders have much more in common with artists than they do
with managers.

HBR C L A S S I C

Managers and Leaders
Are They Different?

COPYRIGHT © 1992 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

by Abraham Zaleznik

What is the ideal way to develop leadership?
Every society provides its own answer to this
question, and each, in groping for answers, defines its deepest concerns about the purposes,
distributions, and uses of power. Business has
contributed its answer to the leadership question by evolving a new breed called the manager. Simultaneously, business has established
a new power ethic that favors collective over
individual leadership, the cult of the group
over that of personality. While ensuring the
competence, control, and the balance of
power among groups with the potential for rivalry, managerial leadership unfortunately
does not necessarily ensure imagination, creativity, or ethical behavior in guiding the destinies of corporate enterprises.
Leadership inevitably requires using power
to influence the thoughts and actions of other
people. Power in the hands of an individual
entails human risks: first, the risk of equating
power with the ability to get immediate results; second, the risk of ignoring the many dif-

harvard business review • march–april 1992

ferent ways people can legitimately accumulate power; and third, the risk of losing selfcontrol in the desire for power. The need to
hedge these risks accounts in part for the development of collective leadership and the
managerial ethic. Consequently, an inherent
conservatism dominates the culture of large
organizations. In The Second American Revolution, John D. Rockefeller III describes the conservatism of organizations:
“An organization is a system, with a logic of
its own, and all the weight of tradition and inertia. The deck is stacked in favor of the tried and
proven way of doing things and against the taking of risks and striking out in new directions.”1
Out of this conservatism and inertia, organizations provide succession to power through
the development of managers rather than individual leaders. Ironically, this ethic fosters a
bureaucratic culture in business, supposedly
the last bastion protecting us from the encroachments and controls of bureaucracy in
government and education.

page 2