In today's global business environment - characterized by instant communication and intense competitive pressure, good, effective leaders are increasingly characterized as being enablers - helping people and organizations to perform and develop. This implies that the leader has to achieve a sophisticated alignment between people's needs and the aims of the organization.

The traditional concept of a manager being the directing chief at the top of the hierarchy, concerned with process and procedures, is nowadays a very incomplete appreciation of what true leadership needs to be.

Today, good leadership is more about the attitudes and behaviors which characterize and relate to the skills a leader demonstrates in the area of interpersonal relationships or emotional intelligence (EQ).

Leadership is centrally concerned with people. Leadership also involves decisions and actions relating to all sorts of other organizational processes, but it is special because of its unique responsibility for people. Leadership can only be said to be operating when other people or followers are involved. You cannot be a leader and work 'on your own'.

Many functions in life are a matter of acquiring skills and knowledge, and then applying them in a reliable way. In fact, we have many terms for different kinds of management such as, marketing management, human resource management, logistics management, quality management and project management - amongst others. This implies that management is about small pieces of the action, small discrete functions or processes, that we can learn and become good at.

Leadership is quite different. Good leadership demands emotional strength and behavioral characteristics which can draw deeply on a leader's mental and spiritual reserves. Leadership is about the bigger picture, it is about direction setting and aligning the goals and values of the organization with the goals and values of the employees working in that organization.

Leadership and management, though often seen as being the same thing, they are not.

Management is mostly about processes and procedures
Leadership is mostly about direction setting, developing others and aligning values

Another way to see how leadership compares with management is that leadership does not depend on the management methods and processes used; leadership instead primarily depends on the ways in which the leader uses these methods and processes, to steer the organization to fulfill the longer term vision.

Good leaders typically have a keen understanding of relationships within quite large and complex systems and networks. People new to leadership, coming from being supervisors or managers in highly operational contexts, often feel under pressure to lead in a particularly dominant way. They find it difficult to make the transition from 'doing it themselves' to 'making it happen through others'.

Sometimes this pressure on a new leader to impose their authority comes from an anxiety to "prove" that though young as a leader he/she is up to the job. The manager in their first leadership position can typically believe that they can only add value by being directive, handing out discrete tasks and micro-managing the team.

Dominant leadership is rarely appropriate, however, especially when leading, a mature team that has, over time, become confident and competent at what it does.

Tough, overly dominant leadership gives teams lots to push against and resist. This push back can become a problem, and results in a cycle of negative behaviors and lessening performance.

Managers do well to remember that people respond well to thanks, encouragement, recognition and inclusiveness - people need to be seen and heard and valued for who they are and not just for what they do. Any manager should adopt these basics of listening to, rewarding and motivating the people who work for them - whether they call themselves a 'leader' or not.

A highly directive, process-driven style could prevent a sense of ownership and self-control developing amongst the people being led, as it is likely to inhibit the positive rewards and incentives vital for teams and individuals to experience to help them cope with change and to get real meaning from their work.

Of course, managers and/or leaders need to be able to make tough decisions when required, but most importantly leaders and managers should concentrate on enabling the team to thrive, which is actually a "serving role" and not the dominant, task-driven role commonly associated with management.