It would be difficult to assess the number of books, articles, podcasts and other forms of leadership content that have been dedicated to distinguishing leadership and management as both principles and practices. The distinction is a rich trope of organizational development that has kept many a conference panel alive and has as much practical urgency as it does philosophical promise.

One distinction between the two is chronological: Leadership generally sets a vision ahead of an organization to be worked out in the future, whereas management works from behind and tries to mitigate and correct and align an organization after issues have already presented themselves. To use an analogy, one could say that if leadership is building a bonfire for people to follow, management is putting out fires that started unexpectedly. Leadership sets a vision and helps people execute it, and management helps people figure things out.

Another distinction is that while a leader actively develops relationships and guides people in the context of these relationships to execute according to their strengths, management is typically more myopic and assesses people more one-dimensionally, according to their functions alone. Leadership tends to view an employee more as a human being to be inspired, whereas management tends to focus on tasks, structure and facilitation at the expense of viewing employees as commodities.

Regardless the numerous applications for discussion, leadership and management are both behavioral in nature, in the sense that they are largely dependent on things someone does (as opposed to simply being aspects of one’s personality). But the behaviors that constitute leadership and the behaviors that constitute management, while similar on the surface, are fundamentally different in their approach. The implication is that if a person in a leadership position intends to execute genuine leadership as opposed to management, this person will need to adopt a radically different set of beliefs and behaviors in order to accomplish this. Moving from managing to leading is more foundational and paradigmatic than adding a new skill or two. It requires a passion for relationship and inspiration.

One of the larger and more consistent themes that emerge in this discussion across various schools of thought is the distinctly human element that separates management from leadership. The more passionate a leader is about creating authentic human connections with team members, the better they can traverse the distance between management and leadership. Does this require that a leader be an extrovert? Not at all — the ability to view human beings in a healthy light (as people with needs and feelings and not as objects or commodities) is unrelated to personality type or extroversion and is simply a way of viewing the world which anyone can adopt.

This is why many organizations, and their leaders, would do well to not obsess over items like product viability, market changes, advertising budgets and the like, if they don’t carry a robust practice of healthy relationships and genuine people focus. A toxic culture has the capacity to do much more damage than any market competitor, and it is often much more silent and subdued. It’s hard for an individual leader to transition from managing to leading if they exist in an ecosystem that views employees primarily as products to be used and thrown away. As I tell my clients, “If you treat your employees like people, you’ll keep them as both. If you don’t treat them like people, you’ll lose them as both.”

It’s always refreshing to see how the “non-business” elements of leadership, like basic empathy, care and listening, carry a commanding influence over a leader’s performance and an organization’s performance. Ultimately, all business issues are people issues.