LEADERSHIP

Leadership

Leadership

Introduction

By the time many people enter college, they have had experience with leadership in a family or community project, a student group, sports team, or part-time job and have begun to develop a set of perspectives shaped by the cultural assumptions that surround them. In this work that developed through the study of literature, the author believes that these already formed perspectives and embedded assumptions often remain intact, causing confusion and sometimes failure as people try to accomplish worthy goals. Clarifying key sources of confusion in the common understanding of leadership has been essential to improving their capacity to lead and to diminishing the odds of their downfall. Most centrally, people often conflate leadership with formal and informal authority; treat adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems; confuse authoritative, managerial expertise with leadership; view leadership as a set of personal characteristics rather than as a set of activities; and define leadership as a value-free practice.

Discussion

Leaders, Followers, and Citizenship

Distinguishing leadership from authority forces us to rethink the way we use the everyday words: leader and follower. At first it may seem odd to suggest that one can have a considerable following and not lead or that one can lead without a following, but that is exactly the point; that is where the logic here takes us.

Our everyday language fails us here by enculturating us to believe that leaders, by definition, have followers. On deeper reflection, many people have a following, yet they do not lead. And many people lead without anything that resembles a following. To be precise, a following is simply a group of people who give authority to someone with the expectation that services will be delivered. And in most problem situations, that is a fair bargain because the authoritative systems will be in place to solve the technical problem with expertise and efficiency, providing the desired service. But whether the person granted authority leads with the powers and influence he or she has been given when the situation calls for adaptive work is another matter.

Again, the common complaint that people in high positions of authority often fail to lead and that people with large followings and therefore high levels of informal authority often fail to lead generate the counterintuitive conclusion that followers do not define leadership (Tucker, 2010). Instead, followers define one half of a formal or informal authority relationship: They are the principal party, authorizing or giving their power to an agent in the hope of obtaining certain services. Agents, who become authority figures, are constrained by the expectations of their followers for services. If they move against the grain of those expectations, they risk losing the powers and influence that come with their authority; they risk their jobs, and they may even risk their lives. Mahatma Gandhi, Anwar Sadat, and Yitzhak Rabin were all killed by disappointed members of their own communities.

Leadership: Personality or Activity?

The common personalistic orientation to the term leadership, with its assumption that leaders are born and not made, is ...