Today, everybody wants to be called a “leader,” while the term “manager” has been pushed into the background.

But is this shift actually good for our schools? Let’s dive into what the academic experts say about the age-old debate between leadership and management, where their perspectives align, and where they diverge.

Where the Experts Agree: The Core Distinctions

1. Leadership is about Change and Influence; Management is about Authority and Maintenance
Scholars generally agree on the fundamental differences in how these roles operate. Educational leadership researcher Larry Cuban defines managing as maintaining current organizational arrangements efficiently, while leading points an organization toward change.

Joseph Rost breaks this down further, explaining that leadership is a multidirectional, noncoercive influence relationship where leaders and followers intend to create real, substantive changes. Management, conversely, relies on a top-down authority relationship designed to coordinate activities and reliably produce results.

2. The “Heroic Leader” Myth is Dangerous
There is a massive consensus that society has inappropriately glorified leadership while denigrating management, creating a “good guy vs. bad guy” narrative. Management expert Henry Mintzberg strongly critiques this excessive “leadership hype”. He argues that putting all the emphasis on a single, heroic individual as the “be-all and end-all” actually destroys the sense of community in organizations and ignores the critical role of middle managers.

3. Both are Absolutely Essential
Schools cannot survive on vision alone. Ian Craig, quoting educational researcher Geoff Southworth, perfectly captures this balance: “Too much management and a school may run smoothly on the spot. Too much leadership and it may be running all over the place and never smoothly” Furthermore, Michael Connolly and his colleagues point out that institutional failures frequently blamed on a “lack of leadership” are very often actually failures of basic management.

The Grey Areas: Where the Experts Disagree

While the core definitions are clear, the academic literature offers some fascinating debates about how these concepts overlap in the real world.

Is Management an Action or a State of Mind?

• Action: Joseph Rost views management strictly as an active authority relationship based on contractual obligations & coordinated activities
• State of Mind: Michael Connolly and his co-authors disagree with defining management simply through actions. They argue that educational management is fundamentally a “state of mind”—the internal burden of carrying the delegated responsibility for a system. In their view, the moment a manager actually takes action to influence others to get a job done, they are technically engaging in leadership, not management

Does Leadership Require Success?

• Many traditional business models equate leadership with achieving excellent results, essentially suggesting that leadership is just “excellent management”.
• Rost strongly rejects this idea. He argues that leadership is a process that does not require successful outcomes. A relationship where people intend to make real changes but ultimately fail to achieve them is still leadership.

Goals vs. Mutual Purposes

• Researchers like Cuban define leadership as mobilizing followers toward achieving specific goals and desired outcomes.
• Rost, however, argues that leadership is about developing mutual purposes, not just goals. He views “goals” as short-term and quantitative (a management concept), whereas “purposes” are broad, holistic, and forged collaboratively between leaders and active followers.

The Cultural Context (The Western Bias)

• Finally, Philip Hallinger introduces a crucial meta-critique: this entire debate over the boundaries of leadership and management is heavily rooted in Western, English-speaking cultures. Because leadership is a socially constructed process embedded in the cultural norms of a society, Hallinger cautions that these strict theoretical distinctions might not seamlessly translate to other socio-cultural contexts, such as East Asia, without further empirical testing.

The Takeaway for Educators

While the education sector has become obsessed with the glamour and prestige of leadership, we cannot forget that teachers and staff actually crave the order, predictability, and stability that good management provides. We don’t just need visionary leaders; we desperately need what John W. Gardner calls “leader-managers” —professionals who can plan for long-term improvement while successfully maintaining the everyday systems that keep our schools functioning happily and effectively.