Leadership & People Management - How Are They Related to Each Other?

Leadership and people management are often considered synonymous with each other. The term leadership means the ability to influence people to drive people to excel in their fields and group efforts. The influence to inspire people and teams comes from a higher or managerial role at an organization. Also, most affluent managers already possess excellent leadership skills and are hired to develop the same in their teams as well as counterparts. Marching Sheep, an HR advisory firm, states that a leader shows trustworthiness, positivity, motivation, creativity, responsibility, and other similar traits.

An effective leader possesses people management skills and develops others while working at a business. Excellent people management is also a useful leadership skill. A leader's role is to act as a role model for his or her peers and deliver results or achieve organizational goals. People management involves directing a person's efforts towards a group or an individual. Employers, managers, and trainers are often concerned with the welfare of the organization. The sole purpose of people management is to drive people towards their organizational goals. At the same time, people management entails taking care of concerns or issues of colleagues and junior/lower-level management.

As per Marching Sheep, these traits come handy in day-to-day people management skills such as training, communication, delegation, evaluation, and performance feedback. So, leadership and people management (more commonly referred to as human resource management (HRM)) are very much related. Leadership skills like inspiration and motivation can drive organizational success. Moreover, leaders adapt to organizations rather than making organizations adapt to them because every organization has its way of functioning. Organizations expect leaders to deliver the best results even during worst-case scenarios.

Moreover, every organization has many different people with different personalities, sensitivities, and sensibilities. People management entails making the best use of the workforce and driving their efforts to achieve organizational success. Therefore, managers, trainers, and employers have to deal with variable factors. These could include workplace problems, harassment, employee dissatisfaction, behavior problems, and work problems. Besides this, all leaders and people managers need to evaluate and share employee feedback. At the same time, there is an inevitable need to balance, manage, and direct these factors so that the employees can deliver optimum output.

Furthermore, most organizations don't just expect leadership and people management skills from mid-level and executive-level employees, but also from employees and internal human resource (HR). Upper and mid-management expect employees that are pursuing to grow in the organization to have leadership and people management skills. Also, people expect these skills from HR because they are regularly involved with the recruitment, relieving, and other areas of all employees.

However, as mentioned before, most of the people management skills are part of leadership skills. On the other hand, most of the leaderships are also a part of the leadership skills. Therefore, both people management and leadership don't just go hand-in-hand, but also very much alike and related to each other.

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