Managing Leadership^®

If we are going to question the wisdom of promoting the cult of the superlative individual leader as the cure for our current difficulties – despite its having so demonstrably also been their cause – it will be worthwhile to examine why we would be so irresistibly drawn to do so. What is the basis of this obviously compelling argument?

This can be surprisingly difficult to do. The term, “leadership,” is used in a remarkably loose – it might be argued, an ill-disciplined – fashion to describe a wide range of behaviors and characteristics. Indeed, some of these – communication, team-building, or various types of employee empowerment, for example – bear little relationship to traditional definitions of leadership, but rather are superficial inflations of the term “management,” which more accurately describes what they are.

We will take the position here at the outset, then, that the family of definitions of leadership that we are discussing is that which incorporates the idea of ineffably sensed forward motion – profound vision, unfathomable wisdom or judgment, courageous decisiveness, a charismatic ability to attract followers, and the like.

After all, it is this type of leadership that we are being told we must place our faith in, so that its exemplars can grasp the reins firmly in their hands, and with reassuring sure-footedness steer we poor, benighted masses out of our barely perceived and dimly comprehended peril. Into which, let it be said again, those exalted exemplars’ predecessors led us.

This is the inescapable heart of what the modern leadership movement means by individual leadership. However slippery the concept becomes across the movement or across time, it inevitably returns to this, beyond which its meaning only degrades.

It is the premise of the argument for this form of leadership that we will examine, beginning tomorrow. We will then turn to the many paths – ranging from distracting to destructive – down which the consequent schools of thought meander.

Please do stop in!

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Today’s tip: One of the side-effects of the current economic turmoil is, of course, unemployment. And one of the side-effects of that is a boost in post-graduate business and management program enrollments by new graduates or down-sized professionals. Hopefully you need not join this particular rush. But if you do, before you do, please take a moment to see Seth Godin’s excellent advice for some potentially much more instructive alternatives. See the follow-up post, as well.

Please also stop over to see Wally Bock’s excellent look at the problems with recently resurfaced false distinctions between management and leadership.

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