What Leaders Really Do

What Leaders Really Do

by John P. Kotter

Reprint r0111f

Required Reading r0111a

Barbara Kellerman

HBR Survey r0111b

Personal Histories:

Leaders Remember the Moments

and People That Shaped Them

Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver r0111c

of Great Performance

Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis,

and Annie McKee

HBR Roundtable r0111d

All in a Day’s Work

A roundtable with Raymond Gilmartin, Frances Hesselbein,

Frederick Smith, Lionel Tiger, Cynthia Tragge-Lakra,

and Abraham Zaleznik

What Titans Can Teach Us r0111e

Richard S. Tedlow

Best of HBR

What Leaders Really Do r0111f

John P. Kotter

The Hard Work of Being a Soft Manager r0111g

William H. Peace

Leadership in a Combat Zone r0111h

William G. Pagonis

Leadership: Sad Facts and Silver Linings r0111j

Thomas J. Peters

The Work of Leadership r0111k

Ronald A. Heifetz and Donald L. Laurie

In Closing r0111l

Followership: It’s Personal, Too

Robert Goffee and Gareth Jones

December 2001

1990

The article reprinted here stands on its

own, of course, but it can also be seen

as a crucial contribution to a debate that

began in 1977, when Harvard Business

School professor Abraham Zaleznik

published an HBR article with the

deceptively mild title “Managers and

Leaders: Are They Different?” The piece

caused an uproar in business schools. It argued that the

theoreticians of scientific management, with their organizational

diagrams

and

time-and-motion

studies,

were missing

half the picture – the half filled with inspiration, vision, and

the full spectrum of human drives and desires. The study of

leadership hasn’t been the same since.

“What Leaders Really Do,” first published in 1990, deepens

and extends the insights of the 1977 article. Introducing one of

those brand-new ideas that seems obvious once it’s expressed,

retired Harvard Business School professor John Kotter proposes

that

management

and

leadership

are

different

but

complementary,

and that in a changing world, one cannot function

without the other. He then enumerates and contrasts the primary

tasks

of

the

manager

and

the

leader.

His key point bears

repeating: Managers promote stability while leaders press for

change, and only organizations that embrace both sides of

that contradiction can thrive in turbulent times.

Copyright © 2001 by Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

Best of HBR

What Leaders

Really Do

by John P. Kotter

L

They don’t make plans; they

don’t solve problems; they

don’t even organize people.

What leaders really do is

prepare organizations for

change and help them cope

as they struggle through it.

eadership is different from

management, but not for the reasons

most

people

think.

Leadership

isn’t mystical and mysterious. It has

nothing to do with having “charisma”

or other exotic personality traits. It is

not the province of a chosen few. Nor

is leadership necessarily better than

management or a replacement for it.

Rather, leadership and management

are two distinctive and complementary

systems of action. Each has its own function

...