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Category Archives: Individual Leadership

False distinctions

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

As we noted yesterday, there is much made of the putative distinction between leadership and management. Moreover, this assertion is inevitably paired with the proud presumption that leadership is also superior to management.
This argument is sufficiently pretentious to be objectionable in and of itself. Concealing a deficit of substance with a surfeit of powerfully articulate [...]

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Hands off my ladder

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Possibly the most impractical and unhelpful – not to mention annoying - “insight” of the past several decades was the “discovery” that management and leadership are different – so much so, in fact, as to be essentially incompatible individual functions. Of course, they are also supposed to be unequal, with leadership superior to management. And thus the modern leadership movement, its members champions in their various incoherent ways of the individual leader, was born. . .

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Looking for leaders

Monday, September 29, 2008

We are all well aware of the strong and enduring tendency to attribute individual leadership to the possession of certain personality traits, or ability to express particular behaviors. We continue to be seduced by such claims despite their having been repeatedly and thoroughly discredited by academic research since the late 1940s. . .

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Leadership by the led

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Politics is a good place to look for lessons regarding the notion of “followership,” which we have been discussing the past few days. It’s worth bearing in mind that much of the blissful prose written about leadership and followership in business ignores the shotgun always present at that wedding. We shouldn’t presume too easily that we fully understand what is producing the effects we think we see. But in politics, it is easier to examine the veracity of the leadership-followership dynamic as depicted by the modern leadership movement. . .

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Leading from the rear

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

“Leaders” don’t enter a group with any inherent authority that arises from their peculiar personal natural traits or learned behaviors. Indeed, they are even unable, really, to assume this lofty state on the basis of their formal contracted mandate. What happens in real life is that the so-called “followers” determine who will accorded their confidence and loyalty – not those who presume themselves to be mystically possessed of leadership skills, not those who have been taught the supposed leadership behaviors by gurus of all types and in various venues, and not even by those who are widely believed to have demonstrated or earned this epithet in previous assignments. . .

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