Managing Leadership^®

We have been questioning the veracity of the modern leadership movement’s various claims for individual leadership. Whichever particular view strikes your fancy of the many offered for what a leader is – or whatever selection you make, from the colorfully diverse display available, for your very own leadership bouquet – there is one prominently shared element of these assertions: they all presume that we can identify leaders on the basis of specific characteristics or behaviors which are the source of this individual leadership.

Moreover, an inescapable consequence of this is that they must therefore further presume that we can use this “knowledge” to create more of it. Otherwise, of course, there is no point to the movement and its claims at all. If the purpose of these observers was simply to produce documentaries about the fascinating and rarely glimpsed creatures called “leaders” for the wildlife and science channels, the phenomenon wouldn’t have the power it clearly does. Too many of us are eager to believe its claims so that they can be realized in us, and too many of its advocates are happy to stoke those ambitions.

But does it smell right to you? We already know that there is no generally accepted definition of individual leadership. That’s fine, just pick any one of them. After decades of the most heated and earnest promotion of this sort of thing, are there any leadership curricula regularly and reliably producing leaders according to any at all of the competing “no-two-ways-about-it” arguments for what it is? Are you aware of any program that accepts novices and routinely transforms them into context-free “leaders” that can safely be parachuted into any situation, produce energized followers from the previously confused and disputing masses, and save the day for everyone involved?

No? Then why are we still talking about individual leadership as though we know what it is and how to produce it?

Actually, there are truly serious-minded and productive observers and advisors who believe in the concept of individual leadership and the value of studying it, but who do not conclude from their insistence that it can be detected that it can also be predicted or produced. We will look at that tomorrow – please do be sure to join us!

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Today’s tip: Speaking of the stubborn perseverance of diversity in the face of insistence that there is only one way to go, please see this terrific article from BNET by Lindsay Blakely about some widely differing corporate management models that all seem to work just fine.

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