Hello to all,
I have been watching this thread for a few days and since the study of
leadership is my passion, I couldn't help but say a few things here. I
have spent some 6.5 years in a doctoral program studying the spectrum of
leadership and leadership development since this subject came to the
forefront of modern thinking, around 1900. While the term leader has been
used since antiquity, leadership is a relatively new term. But this is
not a history lesson. What I am about to say may seem bold, and
confrontational I apologize for that I will be as gentle as possible, but
there are some things that just have to be said I think.
I will use some excerpts from things I have written here time to time to
make a point, I hope to explain them in greater detail as I go. I don't
know how long this statement will be, except it could be fairly long, so
let me also beg your forgiveness for that as well.
James MacGregor Burns a man considered the patriarch of leadership studies
wrote in his bestseller called "Leadership" Page 1.
"The crisis of leadership today is the mediocrity or irresponsibility of
so many of the men and women in power, but leadership rarely rises to the
full need for it. The fundamental crisis underlying mediocrity is
intellectual. If we know all too much about our leaders, we know far too
little about leadership."
This was written in 1978, and as far as I am concerned there is still a
great deal of mediocrity in the understanding of leadership and the
willingness of those who espouse various leadership ideas to accept this
level of mediocrity. This is especially true because significant attempts
have been made to define leadership. Take for example Great man/woman
theory, trait theory, situational and contingency theories, excellence
theory. These have been great undertakings to come up with some way of
codifying the phenomena of leadership. By the way all have been debunked,
but this does not mean that it has been a valuable undertaking. I think
it was Kurt Lewin who once said, that a theory was the only useful idea. I
wrote the following as a way to explain this dilemma.
Imagine you are building a house with a friend helping you. You ask your
friend to bring you a hammer. He goes to the toolbox and returns with a
screwdriver. Amazed, you remark: "I asked for a hammer." He replies,
"this is a hammer!" So goes the world of leadership studies. The only
problem is that if you ask a leadership scholar to bring you a hammer,
i.e. a definition of leadership, you might find yourself buried under
everything from a small jeweler's screwdriver to a bulldozer, and yet some
wouldn't bring you anything at all because for them leadership is an
indefinable phenomenon.
Joe Rost in his book Leadership for the 21st Century found no less than
221 different definitions of leadership in some 550 books and articles.
Even Warren Bennis said his research turned up over 300 definitions of
leadership. Now some may look at this and say Ok that is why we don't
define it, it is too hard. Yet from my point of view accepting this as
something difficult and not rising to the challenge only fosters greater
mediocrity.
Why should we need a workable definition? Well here is one reason.
In the April 8, 1996 issue of Forbes Magazine in an article entitled
Leadership Can Be Learned?, a Penn State Report estimated that
organizations in this country spent over $15 billion in 1995 on leadership
training (defined as training executives or the hierarchy) (Rifkin, 1996).
Fifteen billion dollars divided by 52 weeks, comes to $288,461,539 spent
on leadership training per week. This weekly expense equals 14.5 tons of
twenty dollar bills. (One million dollars in twenty dollar bills weighs
101 pounds).
If we spend 14.5 tons of twenty dollar bills on leadership training every
week in America, what is our return on investment? If we are spending
freight cars full of money every week on leadership training, where are
all the leaders? Where is the leadership?
Imagine if our organizations gave us $288 million dollars a week for a new
information system or a new building and the CEO asked what am I going to
get for my money and our answer was, we can't define it or it just needs
to be experienced. He or She would think we were out of our mind and I am
sure many wouldn't be employed by that organization any longer.
I like to say that if Leadership development were a government program in
American, there would be two Senate investigation and three House of
Representative Committee holding hearings to find out where the money
went. And So they Should?
I mean if we are unable to assess or define what it is that leadership and
leadership development will do for us, why in God's name should we care?
Let's just move on, don't you think.
But as one who has put a great deal of his time and life into the study of
leadership I am confident that I have an understanding of what we expect
to get from promoting leadership.
Let me see if I can explain this.
First, if we reduce all leadership study and work to the simplest idea, I
think I could say that leadership can be viewed as the mobilization of
people to do something. Not only to do something but to do something
significant, hard, difficult or transforming. Ok, how do we do that?]
The industrial models of leadership tell us that one person, the leader is
the sole active force in a leadership dynamic. The essence of the
industrial leadership theories are stated below.
>From him or her all leadership activity flows, and it is senseless to talk
about leadership unless one talks about the leader only. Followers are
passive and are only needed to carry out the wishes, mission or vision of
the leader. This perspective has been the cornerstone of the major
leadership theories of the industrial era which include those of great
man, group, trait, behavioral (contingency and situational), Burns'
transactional, charismatic, and excellence. In other words these
leadership frameworks promote the leader as a single person who by
positional authority or by nature possesses some significant set of
traits, greatness, charismatic personality, who has the ability to know
the right kind of positive or negative motivation depending on the
situation, who has a sense of excellence which can be communicated, or who
has the ability to trade in such a way that followers will do whatever the
leader wishes. The lion's share of the work in leadership studies has
been to distill these factors into discernible elements or qualities which
can be replicated or taught to others for the purpose of creating more and
better leaders. The theme has been if we make better people, we get
better leaders, and the result is that we will get better leadership.
The problem is that the industrial models are no longer congruent with the
world in which we live. In the July issue of Forbes Magazine, the Moses
of Management Peter Drucker said the same thing. Drucker said the models
we use in business today are at least 50 years old, and should be
replaced.
I have accepted that challenge, that is to create something new and
workable in this knowledge society in which we live.
The model of collaborative leadership I feel very strongly about and which
can be viewed if one takes a short hop over to my web page, is based on
the following notion of leadership today.
In the collaborative leadership model the followers as absolutely
essential to the leadership dynamic; in fact they are the essence of the
dynamic in the first place. From this perspective leadership doesn't get
done unless the leader and the followers are engaged together and
committed to a common purpose or vision. This is not merely the followers
carrying out the wishes of the leader; instead it represents the leader
and followers together in the leadership dynamic. The creation of
purpose, vision and the goals of a particular issue becomes a mutual
endeavor. This view of leadership does not negate in anyway the fact that
the leader or another member can have a powerful and creative vision of
his or her own. Instead, as each person relates his or her own vision to
those of other members of the leadership dynamic, their confluence
together provides for an emergent relationship, an emergent sense of
purpose and vision. The most important message is that the leader and the
followers, now called partners or collaborators, are in a relationship
together. To that end the term followers is no longer preferred and
collaborators or partners have become more acceptable because they connote
a more equivalent relationship among the members of the leadership
dynamic. As noted earlier, intrinsic to understanding the leadership
frameworks placed on this scale is the use and essential character of
power because the use of power in the frameworks on the left side of the
scale is different from the meaning and use of power in the frameworks on
the right. Empowerment is replaced with subsidiarity.
In essence, we have been seduced by the word leader for too long. While
the leader is important, it is the leadership dynamic that is the key to
making transforming change, because people do leadership together. Think
of it this way, it is no longer adequate for the followers to trust the
leader only, they must trust each other. This is absolutely essential if
knowledge will be shared openly in an environment where collective
knowledge creation, dissemination, and implementation are the apex of
organizational strength.
I am encouraged to know I am in good company, Senge (The Fifth Discipline
and The Dance of Change,) Rost (Leadership for the 21st Century),
Bradford and Cohen (Power Up: Transforming Organizations Through Shared
Leadership), Drucker, P. (1998, October 5). Management's new paradigms.
Forbes, 155-177, Argyris, C. (1998). Empowerment: The emperor's new
clothes. Harvard Business Review (May-June), 98-105, Schein, E. H. (1992).
Organizational Culture and Leadership. (2nd ed.). San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, and David D. Chrislip and Carl E. Larson authors of
Collaborative Leadership: How Citizens and Civic Leaders Can Make a
Difference (1994).
These folks are the purveyors of a new paradigm of leadership. While they
differ in some ideas, their intent is the same, leadership dances on the
strings of the bonds among a group of people committed to transforming the
context in which they are engaged. The reason is that leadership is a
relationship, and as Gene Taurman noted a process of making change.
Leadership has less to do with being and more about doing, because it is
people engaged together.
There is no such thing as leadership traits, or styles, or does it matter
how charismatic one is or is not. I mean really if you want charisma, go
to your local car dealership and you will get all the charisma you need.
The question is who do you trust???
Ok enough for now.
My Best to all of you and Thanks for your attention.
John P. Dentico, Ed. D.
LeadSimm
Making the Leadership Experience Real
P.O. Box 6305
San Diego, CA 92166-0305
619-226-0547 Office
619-300-3080 Cell and Vm
619-523-3068 Fax
www.leadsimm.com
--"John P. Dentico" <jdentico@adnc.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>