Name: Giwa Nurudeen

Learner ID: 151023

Course: Bus4200

Date: 02/10/2026

1) Why is it important that all managers must be leaders?

Although management and leadership are often used as synonyms, they are not
interchangeable. Management is more concerned with planning, organizing, directing, and
controlling, while leadership is more focused on articulating a vision, encouraging followers, and
implementing change (Duggal, 2025). Through leadership, managers communicate a vision,
motivate employees, and turn compliance into commitment. This is a significant change since
committed employees (as opposed to just compliant ones) are more likely to exert discretionary
effort, be more creative, and less likely to leave the organization. All these contribute positively
to organizational productivity and health. Managers provide a sense of purpose and motivation,
not just purely transactional interactions. Managers also exhibit emotional intelligence and
accountability, aiding the team to better navigate ambiguity and conflict (Duggal, 2025). In
summary, managerial leadership skills empower managers to transform organizational culture
instead of just the processes, and culture is the factor that optimally utilizes the constructed
processes.

Sample personal reflection

In my previous job, my manager practiced effective process management and was very
communicative about the ‘why’ behind our goals. Instead of just assigning tasks, she made the
effort to explain the connection each of the tasks had to the customers and sought input on
how the tasks could be better accomplished. That leadership behavior made me feel trusted
and energized; I started volunteering for cross-team projects and proposed a process
improvement that reduced handoffs by 20%. When managers lead rather than only manage,
they unlock that kind of discretionary effort across the team.

2) How do start-up companies and large corporations differ in terms of leadership and
management?

Due to certain constraints, stages, and scales, there are differences in emphasis on leadership
and management for corporations and startups. Given their stage, startups need a vision for a
solution and need to develop it quickly. They also need to learn which products are in a
desirable market. Given their vision, leaders are decision-makers and try to influence their team
to adopt an agile mindset. They need to experiment and make trade-offs. They need to get the
team to work toward a significant or stretch goal (Harvard Business School, 2018). In the early
stages of a startup, lightweight management tends to take place, which means little to no
management systems are in place, as systems of control are not implemented unless a certain
scale calls for it.

Large corporations, by comparison, have management systems in place, with control systems
including layers of management, regulations, and a massive workforce. There, leaders have to
integrate long-term strategies with, in simple terms, politics, to win the support of stakeholders
while balancing risks to keep the wheels of their very complex operations running. There is also
more of a need to develop systems to manage control and integrate complex systems, which is
also true for the moving parts of a large machine (Harvard Business School, 2018). While your
typical startup leader might replace systems with oversight, large corporations need to have
systems in place to drive engagement.

Start-up leaders are great at visionary discovery and corporate leaders are great at optimizing
exploitation. Leadership styles must become more sophisticated as companies develop. Start-
ups tend to fail when their founders don’t move from visionary mode to scalable governance
and management. On the other hand, large companies trying to adopt behaviors of start-ups
can become bureaucratic without fostering innovation, particularly if there is no empowered
leadership and rapid learning (Harvard Business School, 2018). The bottom line is that the
difference is not about who is ‘better’, but about which leadership-management hybrid style is
appropriate for the organizational context, stage, and strategic focus.

3) In your respective organizations, what are the best management and leadership
techniques that create synergistic relationships among employees?

Building true collaborative synergy throughout the organization requires both managerial
structures that facilitate predictable cooperation and leadership that creates a trusting
environment and motivates people at all levels. The data are clear: managers are one of the
most important factors influencing employee engagement, and effective managers develop
their people and make sure that all their people are working on, aligned to, and engaged in
meaningful work (Gallup, 2015). Solutions to the problem of how to create synergy in your
organization can be broken down into a few areas.

i. Clear shared purpose + frequent “line of sight” communication. The focus of leaders at
all levels of an organization should be on helping their people understand how their
tasks contribute to a broader organizational goal and to a larger impact on society. Then
managers should break that purpose and mission down into achievable goals, concrete
action steps, and clear and transparent measurement systems.
ii. Assignment and development based on individual strengths. Great managers assess
the strengths of each team member and then allocate assignments that utilize those
 strengths. This can improve engagement and teamwork (Buckingham, 2005). When
strengths are allocated across different roles, the results are amplified.
iii. Psychological safety and inclusive leadership. Leaders who solicit disagreement, frame
failure as a learning opportunity, and who are vulnerable support broader collaboration
and improve problem-solving.
iv. Rituals of collaborative structure. Managers impose a cadence of collaboration that
balances the number of meetings with the ability to strategize (e.g., standing meetings,
retrospective meetings, and design meetings).
v. Recognition and joint success. Managers celebrate collaboration across teams to
reinforce behavior that supports collaboration.

When these elements are used together intentionally, with leadership clarifying the end goal
and showing vulnerability, and management setting up systems and metrics that empower
better coordination within and across teams, relationships become synergistic. Knowledge can
be shared openly, and trust will reduce operational friction. Gallup research is, in short,
synonymous with good development and engagement management (Gallup, 2015).

4) Think of a great leader that inspires you most. What have you learned from him/her?

Nelson Mandela studied and worked with leaders and managers all over the globe and created
tools that can apply to all fields. Mandela’s strengths include a powerful moral vision, the ability
to integrate, and the combined discipline to use patient strategy or be decisive. From Mandela,
we gain a number of lessons that can be applied to leadership in organizations:

a) Empathetic vision. Mandela’s political vision was one of justice but also empathetic
towards his opponents. Similarly, leaders can have justice- or principle-based visions, but
to promote long-lasting coalitions they must also empathize with their opponents and
advocates.
b) Long-term strategy and resilience. Mandela spent 27 years in prison and was able to
maintain his goals. Not abandoning strategic goals during imprisonment is a form of
resilience that leaders and managers can model. Setbacks should be viewed from
outside the present and as steps towards a longer, more important goal.
c) Reconciliation. Nelson Mandela was more focused on nation-building than revenge. This
illustrates the potential of inclusive leadership and how opponents can be turned into
collaborators, in the same way that conflicting perspectives can be combined to
transform organizational dissension into constructive output.
d) Moral authority and humility. Mandela was a great role model of these traits, which
were highly influential. Merging persuasive moral authority with humility was a powerful
combination. Leaders must also integrate these traits with their performance to gain the
voluntary collaboration of others.
Applying these lessons in organizations means leaders should articulate an ethical vision, persist
calmly through setbacks, create mechanisms for inclusive problem solving, and lead with
humility and emotional intelligence. Those attributes help leaders not just manage processes
but transform cultures in ways that produce sustained performance and social credibility.

References

Duggal, N. (2025, September 25). Leadership vs Management: Key Differences and Examples.
Simplilearn. [Link]

Julia B. Austin. October 24, 2018. Startup or Established Company? Which Is Best for You?
Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. [Link]
knowledge/startup-or-established-company-which-is-best-for-you?

Randall Beck, & Jim Harter. April 21, 2015. Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Employee
Engagement. [Link]
[Link]?

Nelson Mandela. February 10, 2026. In Encyclopaedia Britannica.