Characteristics
One of the most important things to be said about leadership is that it is commonly very dispersed throughout society. Our leadership needs vary enormously. Many of the great breakthroughs occur because of people well in advance of their time who are willing to agitate for change and suggest fresh new approaches that are, as yet, unacceptable to majority opinion. Many of the leadership needs of a nation are met by persons who do not hold high office and who often don’t look or even act as leaders. Which brings us to the question of defining leadership. Agreement on definition is difficult to achieve. But for the purposes at hand, leaders are people who perceive what is needed and what is right and know how to mobilize people and resources to accomplish mutual goals.
Leaders are individuals who can help create options and opportunities – who can help clarify problems and choices, who can build morale and coalitions, who can inspire others and provide a vision of the possibilities and promise of a better organization, or a better community. Leaders have those indispensable qualities of contagious self-confidence, unwarranted optimism and incurable idealism that allow them to attract and mobilize others to undertake demanding tasks these people never even dreamed they would undertake. In short, leaders empower and help liberate others. They enhance the possibilities for freedom – both for people and organizations. They engage with followers in such a way that many of the followers become leaders in their own right.
As implied above, many of the significant breakthroughs in both the public and private sectors of this nation have been made by people who saw all the complexities ahead of them, but so believed in themselves and their purposes that they refused to be overwhelmed and paralyzed by doubts. They were willing to invent new rules and gamble on the future.
Good leaders, almost always, have been get-it-all-together, broken-field runners. They have been generalists. Tomorrow’s leaders will very likely have begun life as trained specialists. Our society particularly rewards the specialist. John W. Gardner puts it well:
All too often, on the long road up, young leaders become "servants of what is rather than shapers of what might be." In the long process of learning how the system works, they are rewarded for playing within the intricate structure of existing rules. By the time they reach the top, they are very likely to be trained prisoners of the structure. This is not all bad; every vital system reaffirms itself. But no system can stay vital for long unless some of its leaders remain sufficiently independent to help it to change and grow.
Only as creative generalists can these would-be leaders cope with the multiple highly organized groups—each fighting for special treatment, each armed with its own narrow definition of the public interest, often to the point of paralyzing any significant action.
Overcoming fears, especially fears of stepping beyond the boundaries of one’s tribe, is a special need for the leader. A leader’s task, as a renewer of organizational goals and aspirations, is to illuminate goals, to help reperceive one’s own and one’s organization’s resources and strengths, to speak to people on what’s only dimly in their minds. The effective leader is one who can give voice and form so that people say, "Ah, yes – that’s what I too have been feeling."
Note too, however, that leaders are always aware of and at least partly shaped by the higher wants and aspirations and common purposes of their followers and constituents. Leaders consult and listen just as they educate and attempt to renew the goals of an organization. They know how "to squint with their ears." Civic leaders often emerge as we are able to agree upon goals. One analyst has suggested that it is no good for us to just go looking for leaders. We must first rediscover our own goals and values. If we are to have the leaders we need, we will first have to agree upon priorities. In one sense, if we wish to have leaders to follow, we will often have to show them the way.
In looking for leadership and in organizational affiliations – people are looking for significance, competence, affirmation, and fairness. To join an organization, an individual has to give up some aspect of his or her uniqueness, some part of his or her soul. Thus, there is a price in affiliating and in following. The leader serves as a strength and an attraction in the organization – but psychologically there is also a repulsion to the leader – in part because the dependence on the leader. John Steinbeck said of American presidents that the people believe that "they were ours and we exercise the right to destroy them." Effective leaders must know how to absorb these hostilities, however latent they may be.
The leader also must be ever sensitive to the distinction between power and authority. Power is the strength or raw force to exercise control or coerce someone to do something, while authority is power that is accepted as legitimate by subordinates. The whole question of leadership raises countless issues about participation and the acceptance of power in superior subordinate relationships. How much participation or involvement is needed, is desirable? What is the impact of participation on effectiveness? How best for the leader to earn moral and social acceptance for his or her authority? America generally prizes participation in all kinds of organizations, especially civic and political life. Yet, we must realize too that a part of us yearns for charismatic leadership. Ironically, savior figures and charismatic leaders often, indeed almost always, create distance and not participation.
One of the most difficult tasks for those who would measure and evaluate leadership is the task of trying to look at the elements that make up leadership. One way to look at these elements is to suggest that a leader has various skills, also has or exercises a distinctive style and, still more elusive, has various qualities that may be pronounced. By skill, I mean the capacity to do something well. Something that is learnable and can be improved, such as speaking or negotiating or planning. Most leaders need to have technical skills (such as writing well); human relations skills, the capacity to supervise, inspire, build coalition and so on; and also what might be called conceptual skills – the capacity to play with ideas, shrewdly seek advice and forge grand strategy. Skills can be examined. Skills can be taught. And skills plainly make up an important part of leadership capability. Skills alone, however, cannot guarantee leadership success.
A person’s leadership style may also be critical to effectiveness. Style refers to how a person relates to people, to tasks and to challenges. A person’s style is usually a very personal and distinctive feature on his or her personality and character. A style may be democratic or autocratic, centralized or decentralized, empathetic or detached, extroverted or introverted, assertive or passive, engaged or remote. This hardly exhausts the diverse possibilities – but is meant to be suggestive. Different styles may work equally well in different situations. However, there is often a proper fit between the needs of an organization and the needed leadership style. A fair amount of research has been done in this area – but much more remains to be learned.
A person’s behavioral style refers to one’s way of relating to other people – to peers, subordinates, rivals, bosses, advisers, the press. A person’s psychological style refers to one’s way of handling stress, tensions, challenges to the ego, internal conflicts. Considerable work needs to be done in these areas – particularly if we are to learn how best to prepare people for shaping their leadership styles to diverse leadership situations and needs. But it is a challenge worth accepting.
James MacGregor burns, in his book Leadership, offers us yet one additional distinction worth thinking about. Ultimately, Burns says, there are two overriding kinds of social and political leadership: transactional and transformational leadership. The transactional leader engages in an exchange, usually for self-interest and with short-term interest in mind. It is, in essence, a bargain situation: "I’ll vote for you bill if you vote for mine." Or "You do me a favor and I will shortly return it." Most pragmatic officeholders practice transactional leadership most of the time. It is commonly a practical necessity. It is the general way people do business and get their jobs done – and stay in office. The transforming or transcending leader is the person who, as briefly noted earlier, so engages with followers as to bring them to a heightened political and social consciousness and activity, and in the process converts many of those followers into leaders in their own right. The transforming leader, with a focus on the higher aspirations and longer range, is also a teacher, mentor and educator – pointing out the possibilities and the hopes and the often only dimly understood dreams of a people – getting them to undertake the preparation and the job needed to attain these goals.
Of course, not everyone can be a leader. And rarely can any one leader provide an organization’s entire range of leadership needs. Upon closer inspection, most firms and most societies have all kinds of leaders and these diverse leaders, in turn, are usually highly dependent for their success on the leadership performed by other leaders. Some leaders are excellent at creating or inventing new structures. Others are great task leaders – helping to energize groups at problem solving. Others are excellent social (or affective) leaders, helping to build morale and renew the spirit of an organization or a people. These leaders are often indispensable in providing what might be called the huma