Balancing Leadership and Management Strategies Due to the popularity of diverse managerial strategies, the importance of leadership was often underestimated within the recent decades. Renewed interest in the set of personal qualities required for becoming an effective manager was caused by the intense competition at the market. Present day managers come to realize that leadership and management are complementary and need to be combined in the company’s strategies for achieving the organizational success. Management dominating over leadership The sphere of human resource management has got its peculiarities, and the skills required for effective management cannot be associated with the technical skills of organizing the working process. Robbins and Judge (2007) noted that “In today’s increasingly competitive and demanding workplace, managers can’t succeed on their technical skills alone. They also have to have good people skills” (p. 5). Giving preference to management and underestimating the importance of leadership, a manager reduces one’s own and company’s chances for success. For example, in one trading company, a young inexperienced manager trying to gain authority among the senior management decided to start one’s activity from inducing the employees to fill in the detailed reports at the end of every working day devoting 1-2 hours to paper work. On the one hand, this innovation was met at dagger points by employees causing their dissatisfaction and decreasing their commitment to the department mission. On the other hand, a significant part of the working day was wasted on paper work depriving the specialists of opportunities to devote it to communication with customers and polishing up their professional skills. It resulted in reduction of the department sales attracting the attention of the senior management. The main lesson learned from this situation is that leadership is required for becoming an effective manager and is rather a process than a position. Filling the vacancy of a manager is insufficient for becoming a successful leader and making a contribution to the company’s progress. The future learning objectives presuppose enhancing the manager’s awareness of the ways for establishing the rapport with employees on gradual step-by-step basis. Coupling the technical managerial skills with the appropriate personal qualities, an individual will be able to make progress. Leadership dominating over management One should not idealize the leadership-focused approach to solving the management problems. Hughes et al. (2006) admitted that “Most US corporations today, for example, are overmanaged and underled, but strong leadership with weak management is no better” (p. 41). The formal and technical sides of the management issues are not be neglected as well. Lack of organizational efforts and accountability in a company cannot be compensated by the atmosphere of mutual trust, commitment to a strong leader and employees’ involvement in decision-making. For example, in a small pizzeria most of the workers were the members of one big family. All the working relationships were based on mutual trust and devotion to the leader, the head of the family. Though discipline problems never occurred in the fi