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The mystery of "leadership"

by Bruce Watson, Principal and Proprietor, Heads Together

The concept of "leadership" is pervading job advertisements, position descriptions, professional development programs and no doubt, job applicant résumés with great force. A distinction is often made between "leaders" and "managers". A disturbing trend in some of the current writing on leadership is that being a leader is "good" whereas as being a manager is "bad". Is this warranted and what about the "followers"?

Words conjure up pictures - they are powerful in what they can convey. We all form our own picture in our brains when we hear a word like "elephant" which is based on our previous experience of an elephant. We might simultaneously "see" the string of ordered letters that form the word (e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t) and a familiar depiction of an elephant. The specific collection of letters themselves are a symbolic representation of an elephant.The tendency of the brain is to attach meaning to the symbolic representation and "see" pictures of an elephant based on our experience. Similarly, words such as "manager" or "leader" conjure up pictures based on our familiarity or experience of both concepts, positive or negative.  Our individual views can be remarkably different based on our individual assumptions, conceptions and experiences.

"Management" has become so aligned with explicit, functional, mechanistic, “cold” processes such as planning, organising and controlling (some would say this is "bad") while "leadership"  is consistently associated with vision, inspiration, persuasion, influence and motivation (some would say this is preferable and therefore "good"). However, the argument becomes more complex when the skills so freely attributed to managers and leaders can be found in infamous dictatorships. There are dictators who could fit most of the criteria for good management and leadership but they destroyed people's lives. So it needs to be recognised there are good and bad leaders just as there are good and bad managers if we stick to such terminology.

Boring bureaucrats & inspirational figures

The dichotomy so firmly established between "management" and "leadership" is not really helpful because generally speaking managers need to be good leaders and leaders need to be good managers. For example, is it possible to lead without planning or being organised? Is it possible to manage without a vision? Taken to the extremes of the depictions mentioned earlier, managers become boring bureaucrats stuck in the status quo and leaders become inspirational figures with their heads in the clouds. “Leadership” is better thought of as an attributed status rather than a formal position. A helpful distinction is between authority which formally goes with a position and power which is attributed to the position by “followers”. Leadership, then, is something that can move throughout a network of individuals depending on the context and circumstances. For example, extraordinary leadership can be displayed in a meeting of staff by each individual present not only the chairperson or senior staff. Consequently, managers are probably better off trying to work out the complexities of what is going on in the individual minds and throughout the networks of the employees rather than placing such concentration on their own activities as leaders. However, it is clear that directive command in particular situational contexts is very important – ‘good’ managers have to be capable of making timely, informed decisions and be accountable for them in the end.

Leadership unpacked

The concept of management has its own difficulties and this will be explored further in another edition of Headway. For the moment, however, the problems of the concept of leadership are well demonstrated in “A Passion for Excellence” (Peters and Austin, 1985). First the authors' position is: leadership is the key to excellence; but then, leadership and trust are required; but then, leadership, trust and integrity are required; but then, leadership; trust, integrity and listening are required; but then, leadership, trust, integrity, listening, coaching, empowerment are required. The authors claimed to take a common-sense, anti-theoretical approach. This is interesting in itself because anything we claim to ‘know’ is theoretical. Our individual knowledge is based on our observations and senses and how the brain interprets them, consequently some individual theories are going to be better than others. The most common problem in descriptive accounts of leadership like that described in "A Passion for Excellence" is the lack of hard evidence. The final list of assumptions for good leadership starts to sound like what would be expected of a ‘good manager’ in any case so why make a distinction between "managers" and "leaders"?

The evidence for "leadership - is there any?

A basic understanding of “good leadership” tends to say things like: democratic is better than authoritarian, employee-centred is better than production-centred, human relations is better than bureaucratic rules and that good leadership leads to better morale, consequently better/higher production. Really? Where did such notions originate from?

The effects of leadership behaviour were originally categorised by the findings of interdisciplinary designed questionnaire research, e.g. Leader Behaviour Description Questionnaire (LBDQ), used widely in the 1970’s. Through analyses of questionnaire responses the process was, in general terms, to categorise leaders into ‘warm and friendly’ (considerate – people oriented) or ‘operational, organises’ (initiating structure – task oriented).

Using skills and attributes that a researcher has concluded are important for leadership (e.g. democratic, employee-centred) observable behaviours for the skills and attributes are determined (e.g. is friendly, raises morale, sets goals) and data is collected using a questionnaire based on the researcher’s construct. The numerous questionnaire responses are analysed usually through statistical methods or some sort of factor analysis. Then the outcomes are used as evidence to support the researcher's perception of leadership. In summary, a generic leadership construct is defined rather than actually known, somewhat like that described by Peters and Austin above. The concept becomes self perpetuating based on assumptions made right at the start.

On analysis the "leadership" concept described in much of the literature is highly misleading and questionable. A questionnaire respondent, for example, might be asked “A good leader is democratic – Agree / Disagree”. Despite what the respondent might actually believe, prior knowledge that democratic is considered ‘good’ and authoritarian is ‘bad’ will influence the way in which such a question is answered. Also note that the observable behaviours mentioned above are only based on the perceptions and interpretations of questionnaire respondents. For example, what one respondent finds "friendly" or "morale boosting" another may not.

Remarkably, a subsequent conclusion was reached that basically either type of leader, 'warm and friendly' or 'operational-organises', got the job done. The problem, of course, was that contextual and situational effects had not been taken into account. It is difficult to be 'warm and friendly' if the building is on fire and it is your job to get the staff out post haste. It is also difficult to be 'warm and friendly' in a military situation if you are the Captain and your troops are being bombed. There are times where an authoritarian approach is possibly critical. Recognising the extreme limitations of the previous work, some researchers tried to include situational and context factors in adaptations of 'leadership behaviour questionnaires', however, the interpretative and perceptual actions of respondents described above still remained.

An unhelpful dichotomy

The tendency for numerous descriptions of, and prescriptions for, leadership that do not take into  account what leadership might actually ‘be’ is a recipe for disaster.  Studies into implicit learning and tacit knowledge suggest that there are unobservable elements to "leadership" so there is a necessity to put aside the simplistic viewpoints so widely available and try harder to make sense of the complexities.

Yes, the difficulties with the concept of management can still be argued, but using “leadership” as a separate concept is generally proving unhelpful. It may well be concluded that good management includes "leadership" as a necessary attribute and skill,  when there is a firmer grip on what leadership actually is. A further conclusion is that “leadership” may boil down to  influencing in an appropriate way taking into account the context and situation elements of the circumstances. And surely influence is something that is distributed throughout organisations, just as learning and knowledge are. This suggests that the individual manager as the total "unit of analysis" is not  really going to assist organisational performance or management practice in the long run. What about the employees, followers and antagonists?

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"They say you should start with vision and mission and so on. Well, I think that's a load of old cobblers. What it does is open the opportunity for the chief executive to go on an ego trip."

"You really need to think deeply about why you're in business"

John Argenti, Business Review Weekly, March 3 -9, 2005

Dr. Bruce D Watson,

Principal and Proprietor,

HEADS TOGETHER

April 2004

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