I am going to make a somewhat surprising response by
looking at leadership through Systemic, Learning Organiz-
ation eyes. If a learning team is a cooperative autopoietic
system connected by autonomous collaboration rather that
command hierarchy, leadership is then a bottom-up emergent
process rather than a top-down command and control process.
The leadership question thus reframes itself and becomes:
"What patterns or modes of leadership emerge (bottom-up)
in a collaborative system? Let us call them (or their
roles) `emergent leader' in a collaborative system?"
I have an instrument, empirically validated, at least
indirectly, that assesses four interacting emergent
leadership modes. Two are the familiar "white-hat" leader
roles, the (1) Task Leader and (2)Social-Emotional Leader.
Two new "black-hat" (but not really) leaders have emerged
out of the study of literally hundreds of groups. They are:
(3) The "Defiant," or "Outside" leader who lurks on the
periphery of the group and functions as an insurance
policy for the others against engulfment. The fourth
is the "Scapegoat" or "Opening" emergent leader role.
The SL pushes the group too far too fast too soon, and
as a result is usually ostracized or even extruded from
the group. But if SL hands in there long enough he will
by later appreciated for catapulting the group ahead where
it was reticent to grow.
In addition, I have a test of "collaborability," i.e., the
ability to open up one's boundaries to another or others
to become a unitary collaborative system. Both of these
instruments have "lite" versions which take four minutes
and are self-scoring, and a full version which has a higher
reliability. Incidentally, the Collaborability Scale has
a "walk-your-talk index" which discriminates between those
who offer politically correct rhetoric about the value of
collaboration, and those who practice what they preach.
Collaboration Laboratories is working on a whole toolbox
of "Collaborative Utilities" Meet "CLABORN, The world's
first collaborative computer program.
Collaboration Laboratories will soon be loading its website
with descriptions and order forms for all these utilities.
We call them "utilities" rather than "applications"
because Apps tend to build their ansewr into the question
while a utility just helps you with your own housekeeping.
For example, it doesn't tell you what to do with the spread
of collaborability you might find in testing your group.
James Durkin Ph.D.
Collaboration Laboratories
663 Coventry Road
Kensington, CA 94707
(510) 524-8922
colabtek@vdn.com
www.collablabs.com
--Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>