difference between maven and cucumber test runner

In my project I use cucumber + Junit. 
to generate reports, I use maven-cucumber-reporting.
This report is only generated when I run my test
as a maven lifecycle verify. Becuase this is
how it works according to its configuration. 
So if I run my test from runner file, it does not
trigger the maven lifecycle. It only runs that test. 
In order to run any maven lifecycle we have to run
as a maven command which starts with 'mvn'.