The Ethical Difference: Why Leaders Are More Than Managers.

The Ethical Difference: Why Leaders Are More Than Managers Joseph D. Ports Rocky Mountain Press 2001 150 pages, $16.95 Paperback

You're standing in front of a group of students or executive trainees, having just expounded what you believe (or what your favorite leadership theorist believes) to be the essence of leadership. Now it is time for questions from the floor. Question one: "In 25 words or less, what's the difference between leadership and management?" According to a recent book, unless your answer centers on ethics, you'll be missing the mark--and not just by a little.

Scholars have wrestled with the difference between managing and leading for decades. In a new book entitled The Ethical Difference: Why Leaders Are More Than Managers, Joseph Potts introduces a new approach to this critical distinction. As an administrator at the University of Kansas who has taught leadership courses for a number of years, Potts may be the first to locate the difference squarely and exclusively in the domain of ethics. He argues that the meaningful, purposeful essence of leadership is clearly seen only when contrasted with the morally neutral, non-ethical, survival-oriented nature of management.

It has been 24 years since Robert Greenleaf wrote his classic Servant Leadership; 25 years since J.M. Burns wrote his landmark work Leadership; 11 years since Joseph Rost's sweeping, paradigm-defining Leadership for the Twenty-First Century. These three books have shaped the formal study of leadership more than any others and, as Joanne Ciulla has pointed out, the definitions and theories they contain carry strong normative implications. That is, they suggest that things ought to be done a certain way; they point to ethics. Given the last 25 years of work by leadership scholars Potts distills from them a new theory of leadership that seems to be the logical next step.

The Ethical Difference begins by identifying a fundamental divergence between the ideas of Burns and Rost, and then attempts to craft a new theory of leadership, one grounded in ethics, that draws from and extends on both. Potts argues that Burns' idea of transforming leadership can be seen to assume ethical ends, while Rost generally assumes ethical means to be essential in his well-known definition of leadership. Ciulla, in turn, has recently argued that ethics is the "heart" of leadership, but did not take up the larger theoretical implications of such an assertion. Potts' point in his review of these works is that, if properly understood as a subcategory of philosophy, ethics will be seen as having to do with universal principles or values. Such principles, if one thinks correctly about them, demand attention to both ends and means, not just one or the other.

Potts argues that ethics by definition ...