On Effective Leadership

Across Domains, Cultures, and Eras

G. Chandler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137300706
• eBook ISBN: 9781137318329
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

Using case studies from a wide range of fields and historical settings, On Effective Leadership seeks to explain why some leaders are effective, why many are not, and whyonly a very few are exceptional.

P A R T I

Effective Leadership: A New Framework

C H A P T E R O N E

The Leadership Conundrum

Before discussing what makes leaders effective or ineffective, it is important to define what leadership is and is not, since the term is often used loosely to describe a wide array of relationships between the formal or informal head of a group and its members. Because virtually all human beings experience leadership throughout their lives, most believe that they can recognize it when they see it, though few might define the term in precisely the same way. Thus, the definition of leadership on which any comprehensive theory is based must be broad enough to encompass the full range of relationships that most people would regard as leadership.

It may be best to begin with what leadership is not in order to bound its definition. First, in our view leadership is not the sheer exercise of power, which we define in this context as the use of physical, psychological, and other forms of coercion used to control followers’ thoughts or behavior. Resorting to coercion alone, or even primarily, to induce the cooperation of one’s followers, whether that power is exercised brutally through physical force or psychological terror, or subtly through rewards, sanctions, and propaganda, would be termed by most contemporary leadership scholars as despotism, tyranny, or simple thuggery, but not as leadership.¹ In such cases, the goals of the group cannot, by definition, be the same as those of the power-wielder, who is forcing submission to his will, not leading. Does this mean, however, that effective leaders never use power? No, in practice a perceptive and skilled leader will sometimes use a blend of persuasion and power in certain situations, especially if failure to do so would imperil the achievement of goals essential to the collective good.²

For example, during the Civil War Abraham Lincoln used his presidential power to suspend the civil right of habeas corpus and issue the Emancipation Proclamation, acts that were opposed by a substantial number of his constituents. His justification for these highly controversial actions was their importance to the ultimate goal he shared with his followers: the preservation of the Union. Only through the Union, he believed, would the Constitution, which guarantees all rights, be protected and slavery ultimately be abolished throughout the United States. Thus, despite his distinctive powers of persuasion and his unquestioned moral core, even Lincoln felt obliged to use his positional power in the interests of what he saw as the collective good. Still, the use of power to supplement persuasion is a slippery slope upon which leaders must tread with care.

Second, if leaders must rely primarily on persuasion to mobilize their followers, does it follow that they can only gain their positions legitimately through democratic political means? Democracy as a widespread form of government is a relatively recent historical phenomenon. Intellectual historian Francis Oakley argues in his book Kingship (2006) that throughout most of history the legitimacy of the head of state in almost all cultures was based on his sacral role,³ while the leaders of most civil, military, religious, and other institutions were drawn from a hereditary aristocracy. Though the Enlightenment led to the principle that legitimacy stems from the consent of the governed, even in the United States the rights of citizens to participate in the electoral process were limited for a long time, and the gradual expansion of suffrage has only been achieved through two centuries of struggle to eliminate economic, racial, and gender barriers to the ballot. Even today, in many domains ranging from business to education to sports, leaders gain their positions legitimately by inheriting them or through appointment by a governing board or other small elite body. In our view, the key criterion for legitimacy is whether a leader has gained her position through a widely accepted process wherein the followers willingly confer that power.

Third, does gaining an institutional position of authority through legitimate means automatically mean that the holder of the position is a leader? No, those who hold positions designed to ensure the efficient and effective operation of an institution are managers, not necessarily leaders.⁴ In many cases, managers need neither to persuade nor to coerce subordinates to follow their directions so long as their goals are acceptable to, if not completely congruent with, those of their subordinates. Subordinates may comply in exchange for some form of gain from the institution, a job, for instance, or spiritual fulfillment, or an education. Indeed, in a stable environment good management may be all that a strong, well-organized institution needs. Usually it is only in an unstable situation or where management’s objectives become unacceptable to subordinates that the calls for leadership tend to arise. This may occur, for example, when a corporation faces a new competitive threat and the possibility of layoffs, or when a church or school is perceived as violating the values it espouses. It is then that we learn whether these managers can also become leaders who convert their subordinates into followers.

Thus from the first three dimensions of what leadership is not, an inclusive definition of what leadership is begins to emerge. It is the use of persuasion as the primary means to achieve a goal mutually shared by a leader and a group of followers, whether that goal is relatively narrow and mundane or more fundamental and visionary. Such leadership can be exercised from a position of authority or without any formal authority at all, but it is always more than just capable management. In practice, it often is composed of a mix of persuasion and some judicious use of the power conferred by the leader’s position, a position willingly bestowed by the group, whether the process for doing so is democratic or not. Moreover, the leader and his followers share the end goals, including when, as James MacGregor Burns suggests, the leader is making “conscious what lies unconscious among followers.”⁵

The final dimension along which to define what leadership is not is the element of morality. Some contemporary commentators believe that morality is an essential element of leadership. Most notable is Burns, the author of Leadership (1978), who is viewed by many as the dean of modern leadership studies. Burns argues that leaders and followers must share mutual needs, aspirations, and values. These values include both ends, or collective goals, and means, or modes of conduct in achieving those ends. According to Burns, the act of leadership is the ability to persuade a group of followers, who are aware of the competing alternatives, to make an informed choice to pursue the goals advocated by the leader. When they do so in exchange for something they value—jobs in exchange for their votes, for example—Burns calls it transactional leadership.⁶ When a leader’s effort raises the aspirations of followers to an even higher level of morality and motivation such as the search for liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness, Burns terms it transforming leadership. When neither condition exists, it isn’t leadership at all; it is power-wielding.⁷

We wish we could agree. Regrettably, however, there are many examples throughout history of leaders who persuade their followers—not force them—to pursue unethical goals and to use unpalatable means to achieve them, as judged by the commonly held moral standards of their times. From demagogues and street gang leaders to corrupt politicians and businessmen, the list is long. Indeed, even some leaders who qualify as “transforming” under Burns’s definition used questionable means, such as Franklin Roosevelt’s obfuscations while preparing the United States to enter World War II and Lincoln’s aforementioned use of executive power to save the Union. Another complication of incorporating morality into the definition of leadership is that moral values can be very different across cultures, as with the treatment of women in traditional Islamic societies. Which culture’s values should provide the ethical norms in judging whether an individual is acting as a leader? Even within a given society, different groups can have sharply conflicting definitions of moral goals, as the ongoing dispute between prolife and prochoice activists illustrates in contemporary America.

Consequently, we agree with those who contend that, while moral leadership is highly desirable, there is no compelling argument that morality must be a component of leadership.⁸ Instead, for us the important distinction is between what we define as effective leadership and exceptional leadership. Effective leadership (and ineffective leadership as well) can be moral, immoral, or morally neutral. It is simply leadership that successfully achieves the mutual purpose shared by the leader and his followers, followers who were won and motivated primarily through the leader’s exercise of persuasion.

Exceptional leadership, however, cannot be immoral in either means or ends. What makes it exceptional is the combination of the leader’s effectiveness and the worthiness of the goal achieved. This will often, though not always, mean the achievement of morally based ends. It will always, however, meet Ronald Heifetz’s broader definition of a “socially useful,” even if morally neutral, goal such as the founding of a job-creating new company or an excellent new charter school.⁹ It excludes, by definition, the achievement of an immoral goal, as judged by the larger, contemporary society and the verdict of history. At the highest level of achievement, as Franklin Roosevelt said of the great presidents, exceptional leaders are “leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas . . . had to be clarified.” The worthier the goal, the more difficult its achievement, and the more widespread its benefits, the more transforming and exceptional we regard the leader. It is on this basis that we revere leaders such as Roosevelt himself, as well as Washington, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

* * *

Our definition of leadership suggests some qualities a leader should possess—for instance, the skill of persuasion and the ability to set compelling goals. But can we give a comprehensive answer to the question of what makes some leaders effective, many ineffective, and only a very few exceptional? We argue that any comprehensive theory or framework must meet three criteria to be judged as robust and useful. First, a robust framework should be able to identify the key principles underlying effective, and ineffective, leadership in any domain or leadership situation. Second, the framework should be applicable across cultures and over time. Third and finally, in addition to explanatory power, the framework should have some prescriptive power, even if it is limited. More specifically, it should help in identifying those with the highest potential to become effective leaders and in determining the best means for developing that potential. Ideally it would also help active leaders to analyze the leadership challenges of a given situation and formulate broad strategies to meet those challenges.

These criteria reveal the limitations of most traditional theories of leadership. The oldest and most durable is the traits or Great Man theory, which postulates that only those people with exceptional, even heroic, character, talents, and physical traits can be great leaders. This idea of leadership has held center stage for 25 centuries, from Confucius’s notion of the superior man to Plutarch’s biographies of eminent Greeks and Romans, from Thomas Carlyle’s focus on heroes to Max Weber’s theory of charismatic authority. Most people still instinctively believe that great leaders must be, indeed can only be, great men or women, probably because such leaders often have important physical, emotional, and/or intellectual attributes that distinguish them in the eyes of followers.

Yet when twentieth-century social psychologists and management scientists tested the traits theory in an empirical, ostensibly scientific manner, they soon found that they could not identify a common set of traits that explained leadership success in all circumstances. When researchers shifted their attention from traits to behaviors, they encountered the same problem. Even when they added the elements of situation and contingency to the mix, the results indicated that successful leadership was marked by a bewilderingly large number of combinations of behaviors, situations, and contingencies, rather than a neat, predictable pattern, even among the limited number of situations studied.¹⁰

One painstaking attempt by psychologists Steven Rubenzer and Thomas Faschingbauer to find a correlation between the success of American presidents and their personalities illustrates the difficulty.¹¹ In their study, they enlisted more than 120 experts; at least 3 with detailed knowledge of a given president rated that president on a 592-item personality questionnaire. These data and more were reduced to an index of nine personality characteristics that the authors claim is predictive of successful presidents.¹² Yet on the resulting scale of suitability for the presidency, Richard Nixon and Millard Fillmore were equals with Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and Truman. All were predicted to have only “average” prospects for presidential success. On the same scale, Jimmy Carter tied Woodrow Wilson as the fourth most “well-suited” for the presidency. James Polk, meanwhile, was predicted to be “poorly suited,” despite his high rating by historians as a brilliant political operator who worked all the levers of government, party, and public opinion to fulfill his vision of America’s “manifest destiny” by adding Texas, the Oregon territory, California, and the southwest to the Union.¹³ Like another tough-minded politician Lyndon B. Johnson, Polk was a master of exploiting the political process to get his way.

Such findings do not provide much confidence that personality characteristics alone can either explain retrospectively the degree of a leader’s effectiveness or predict prospectively who will be a successful leader. The best that decades of statistical research has been able to demonstrate is that five broad personality characteristics (known in psychology literature as the “Big Five”) are most often correlated with effective leaders: extraversion/assertiveness, intellect/openness to experience, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and agreeableness.¹⁴ Broad as these characteristics are, the statistical correlations are far from perfect, and counterexamples among successful leaders are legion.

The extent to which a leader is able to leverage her personal strengths and overcome her weaknesses seems a better explanation than simply her traits or broad personality profile. While George Washington was not particularly intellectual, he was able to use his charismatic presence, strong will, impeccable values, and steely self-control to become the “indispensable man” in the founding of the United States. Although John Adams was irascible, combative, and impolitic, as well as far from charismatic, his intellectual brilliance and tenacity enabled him to play a vital role in the nation’s founding.

In summary, the variability in the combination of traits and behaviors exhibited by successful leaders in different situations is simply too great to be useful in explaining what makes leaders effective or ineffective. Even if a particular personality characteristic could be identified as common to effective leaders, clearly something else is missing if a comprehensive framework is to be developed.

C H A P T E R T W O

The Temple and the Genome

Over the past few decades, several new promising theories of leadership have emerged, all of which focus on the core activities of leadership, instead of the physical or personality attributes of leaders. The most notable are those proposed by James MacGregor Burns, Howard Gardner, and Ronald Heifetz. Each of them brings a fresh perspective to the study of leadership based on his professional background as a political scientist, psychologist, and physician/educator, respectively. Together their theories illuminate several critical elements of effective leadership, and our proposed framework builds on the foundation they have created.

To view leadership as primarily a set of activities does not mean that personal traits and behaviors are irrelevant to a leader’s effect...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I   Effective Leadership: A New Framework
• Part II   Organizing Change
• Part III   Powers of Persuasion
• Part IV   Transforming Visions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index