We like to regard excellent executives as leaders but some may only manage. This jars with common sense. Exploring why this is can help us understand what executives do.
In modern organizations, leadership can be bottom up as well as top down. It can even come from outside the business altogether. If this is true, we need to understand what executives are doing when they are not leading. This means we need an understanding of what executives do that shows how it is possible for them to make a productive contribution without necessarily leading. The point here is we need to break the executive's monopoly on leadership to account for how leadership can come from elsewhere. This is critical in an age where all employees want to have a say in where their organizations are going. Increasingly, knowledge work is causing a shift in power so that leadership is becoming equated more with the power to promote better ideas rather than just having a larger than life personality.
This jars with common sense because we are stuck with a hard-wired preconception of what it means to be a leader. We have the biological bias to form ourselves into hierarchies, just as do most higher animals. So, we are programmed to see the top dog as our leader. Secondly, being inherently paternalistic, our image of the good leader is a father figure, someone who knows what to do and can calm our fears in the face of adversity. Again, this means that an effective chief executive must be seen as our primary leader. But the world is fast changing. Our knowledge driven, rapidly innovating organizational life is demanding a more democratic, less hierarchical distribution of power. People in low level positions can champion a new product and, thereby, show leadership without wanting to dominate the group or be seen as a parental figure. The bottom line is that some executives do provide leadership, but some are great managers instead. For more on this topic, see my article entitled What is an Executive: http://businessmanagement.suite101.com/article.cfm/what_is_an_executive
