Leaders, in other words, are innovators, they are men and women of vision, who take risks to inspire and to do the right thing. Management, meanwhile, is more concerned with organization, efficiency, oversight of employees – the more day-to-day activities involved in the running of an organization and in making sure that the organization and its employees are doing things right (Hughes, Gannett, & Church, 2000, p. 8) History has provided us with numerous examples of individuals who were incredibly leaders, but who also were adept at managing their followers and subordinates, with varying degrees of effectiveness and success.
Typically, the ones remembered are the ones that were the most successful in this task. One example of such an individual is perhaps remembered as one of the most vile human beings to have ever walked this Earth, a partially-educated failed artist from Austria named Doll Hitler. Born into a poor family in 1889, Hitler dropped out of school after failing his exams at the age of 15. An aspiring artist, he movies to Vienna at 18 and applied at two art schools, both of which rejected his application.
He served in the German Army during World War l, and in 1919 began what would become his career as politics when he made a passionate speech before the anti-Semitic German Workers Party. Two years later, he was its leader, and the party renamed itself the National Socialist German Workers’ Party – also known as the Nazi Party (History. Co. UK, 2014). What made Hitler such an effective leader? I would say that there were several hinges that contributed to his political success, the first of which is that he was a passionate and charismatic orator, who attracted crowds to the German Workers’ Party simply because they wanted to see and hear him.
Secondly, Hitler was an intelligent man who understood how to use the rapidly-deteriorating economic conditions in Germany at the time to his advantage, attracting ever-greater support; by 1923, the Nazi Party under Hitter’s leadership numbered 56,000 members. When he rose to power as Chancellor in 1933, it had grown to more than ten times that size (History. o. UK, 2014). While initially tremendously successful as a popular political leader, Hitler was also an intelligent man with a prodigious memory for detail (Manager, 2011). However, he proved to be far less successful as a manager than he had been as a leader.
While he insisted increasingly on taking ever-greater personal control of the German military and its actions, there were two major obstacles that would prevent Hitler from being an effective manager: His own arrogance, and his mistrust of his generals. As time went on, Hitler “came to believe that Germany’s stories were his alone and that most of his generals were… Incapable” (BBC 2). Hitler himself was erratic, stubborn, “shunned serious, comprehensive intellectual effort and was largely ignorant of military affairs and foreign cultures” (Manager, 2011).
In spite of this, he insisted on increasingly taking a greater and greater role personally in the management of the wars in which he led Germany. Yet he tended to refuse to acknowledge any information that did not agree with his own opinion, and he often procrastinated on military decisions, sometimes for weeks (Manager, 2011). These and his and his senior commanders’ failures to create and adhere to a coherent strategy represent failures in management that ultimately led to Germany’s eventual defeat.
In conclusion, as a leader, Hitler was a man of vision, however horrifying that vision may have been, and a tremendously successful orator who managed to unite an entire nation behind his banner and its ideals, however twisted. However, his arrogance, lack of knowledge about the complexities of running a nation especially in time of war, and his own erratic temperament meant that he as an extremely poor manager, which ultimately led to his eventual failure, culminating in his suicide in 1945 (History. o. UK, 2014).
