Managing Leadership^®

Never mind asking what leadership is – let’s start by asking what it does. We have enough people jumping into the pool trying to make the biggest splash over definitions of leadership and leaders – especially by setting up disparaging comparisons with management and managers. But how many people actually start from the beginning?

What, after all, is the demand for individual leadership? What do they do that really needs doing? And what about leadership itself? What are the functions that leadership performs uniquely for our organizations that otherwise would go begging?.

You’d be surprised, perhaps, at how little serious discussion there is of this. It’s there, but you have to work to locate it amid all the dross. What you’re most likely to find tends to fall, in generally descending volume, into three categories.

1. Silly comparisons with traditional bosses and witless managers. For example, you will find some who believe that the best way to describe the need for leadership is to offer illustrations like this: bosses create fear, and leaders, enthusiasm. Or, the boss makes work dull, the leader makes it fun. Seriously, people make a living describing this sort of thing as the purpose of leadership.
2. Charismatic personal characteristics that invest an organization with vision, energy, and purpose – leadership’s function. In this view, individuals carry something that is inherently theirs, that emanates uniquely from them, into their leadership position atop an otherwise moribund organization, essentially breathing life into it.
3. Lists of functions that, upon examination, can be easily understood to really be quite ordinary administrative or management tasks. These vary widely. One source indicates that a leader accepts three functions that he or she must carry out: authority, responsibility, and accountability. Others more pertinently describe organizational benefits provided by leadership, running from vision through communication to execution. But these, too, can really be restated as management tasks with no violence at all done to their worth.

These sorts of stunts point to a real problem, here. The modern leadership movement starts from the presumption that leadership is not only distinct from, but superior to management. As a result, you see the three categories above, comparing it favorably to management, describing exalted personal characteristics that alone can give expression to it, or rephrasing the functions themselves in grandiose language that belies their fundamental managerial origin.

The proponents of this movement then climb right onto the latest bandwagon to pass by, or attempt to create the latest fad, about the personal characteristics you need to become a great leader yourself.

So that you can do what, exactly, again? Create fun? Give life? Appear and disappear in puffs of smoke, obscuring the real work being done by real managers?

This week, we’ll take our own humble throw at the task; we’ll begin to try to answer the question: Why leadership? See you then!

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Today’s tips: Speaking of plunging right past the real need for a service to jury-rigging up peculiar versions of it, please see this review by John Agno, at CoachingTip: The Leadership Blog, on how parting your hair indicates your leadership potential.

We discussed the difficulty of reconciling personal morals with business ethics a few days ago. Please see this excellent look at the topic from the perspective of microfinance, from The Economist.

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