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Category Archives: Managing Leadership

Art school

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Our current discussion of the nature of leadership was provoked by comments made by to a post published a month ago called “Great Leader Theory.” Interestingly, while most of those comments expressed dissatisfaction to one degree or another with my efforts to present my view of leadership, they also implied disagreement with key contentions of the modern leadership movement. . .

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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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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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The herd instinct

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

A key and persistent assumption about leadership is that it typically emanates from specifically skilled or capable individuals. It then is more or less passively received by others, acting on them in a way to spur a focus and energy that would not otherwise exist among them. But consider this, from the humorist “Texas” Bix Bender: “If you’re ridin’ ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it’s still there.”

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