Managing Leadership^®

We are still trying to figure out how to get past the ubiquitous question of what leadership is – a question that so many scramble to answer – to the more important question of what leadership does. How many people have you discussed that with? Who has ever told you what specific functions leadership performs for an organization?

It somehow seems so obvious that there are such functions that we don’t want to be bothered debating the obvious – we just want to figure out how to get some of it. More than that, we want to become one of those who provide it – a great leader – ourselves.

But we’ve tried to establish over the past several months that it is precisely when you think something is beyond debate that you ought to carefully and minutely reexamine your assumptions about it. Surely you are aware that people sometimes squander great parts of their careers through ill-considered investments in ideas that turn out to be fundamentally unsound simply because they are prompted to do so by people who we think we should trust. Who is responsible for that wasted time – the quack peddling nonsense, or the rubes uncritically lining up to pay a dollar for a bottle of miracles?

We, being neither of those, will continue to examine the fundamental idea of leadership, then. In the past few days we have tried to get a sense of what leadership does. I told a story of what appeared to be leadership, but that may actually have coincidentally been something altogether different.

That story suggested that goals – big, exciting goals – may have something, somehow, to do with leadership, even individual leadership. So, we have begun to look at that, also.

It seems that the right goal isn’t determined by how audacious it is, or how stirring, but rather by how good a fit it is for all the circumstances in which the organization finds itself. This is an immense subject, and we can’t cover it all here.

But we can hit the central points. And, we can recall that, even though we will be touching on this, we aren’t really talking about how to establish goals. We are talking about what leadership is – what it does – and speculating about the role that goals play in that.

So, next week we will look a bit more closely at where goals come from, what purpose they serve, how organizations respond to them, and what this suggests about the nature and functioning of organizational leadership.

Have a great weekend – we’ll see you on Monday!

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Today’s tip: Speaking of the complex topic of goals, where they come from, and how they affect organizations and the leadership of them, please see this thought-provoking post by Rob Jacobs of Education Innovation. Rob picks up on our discussion here to describe a particularly challenging way goals are sometimes imposed on organizations – please read it to see the problem.

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