What do leaders think about their goals?

They are active instead of reactive, shaping ideas in­stead of responding to them. Leaders adopt a personal and active attitude toward goals. The influence a leader exerts in altering moods, evoking images and expectations, and in establishing specific desires and objectives determines the direction a business takes. The net result of this influence is to change the way people think about what is desirable, possible, and necessary.

What do managers and leaders do? What is the na­ture of their respective work?

Leaders and managers differ in their conceptions. Managers tend to view work as an enabling process involving some combination of people and ideas in­teracting to establish strategies and make decisions. Managers help the process along by a range of skills including calculating the interests in opposition, staging and timing the surfacing of controversial issues, and reducing tensions. In this enabling process, man­agers appear flexible in the use of tactics: they nego­tiate and bargain,, on the one hand, and use rewards and punishments, and other forms of coercion, on the other.

What about leaders, what do they do? Where manag­ers act to limit choices, leaders work in the opposite direction, to develop fresh approaches to long-standing problems and to open issues for new options. Stanley and Inge Hoffmann, the political scientists, liken the leader's work to that of the artist. But unlike most art­ists, the leader himself is an integral part of the aesthetic product. One cannot look at a leader's art without look­ing at the artist. 

To be effective, the leader needs to project his ideas into images that excite people, and only then develop choices that give the projected images substance. Con­sequently, leaders create excitement in work.

Leaders work from high-risk positions, indeed often are temperamentally disposed to seek out risk and dan­ger, especially where opportunity and reward appear high. From my observations, why one individual seeks risks while another approaches problems conservatively de­pends more on his or her personality and less on con­scious choice. For some, especially those who become managers, the instinct for survival dominates their need for risk, and their ability to tolerate mundane, practical work assists their survival. The same cannot be said for leaders who sometimes react to mundane work as to an affliction.

What are manager's and leader's relations with oth­ers? There are two positions that clarify managerial at­titude toward human relations. First, the need to seek out others with whom to work and collaborate seemed to stand out as important characteristics of managers. Managers prefer to work with people, they avoid solitary activity because it makes them anxious.

The second feature of managers is connected with the necessity to maintain a low level of emotional in­volvement in these relationships.

Managers relate to people according to the role they play in a sequence of events or in a decision-making process, while leaders, who are concerned with ideas, relate in more intuitive and empathetic ways. The man­ager's orientation to people, as actors in a sequence of events, deflects his or her attention away from the sub­stance of people's concerns and toward their roles in a process. The distinction is simply between a manager's attention to how things get done and a leader's to what the events and decisions mean to participants. Leaders attract strong feelings of identity and difference, or of love and hate. Human relations in leader-dominated structures often appear turbulent, intense, and at times even disorganized. Such an atmosphere intensifies in­dividual motivation and often produces unanticipated outcomes.

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