What do we expect from leaders to do and to provide? What would we demand from ourselves in that role? In any role we do, we need to have a solid basic picture of such expectations. As challenges a group or an organisation faces may turn out to be quite boundless, we will benefit greatly from creating a firm understanding of where our roles begins and where it ends.
In my posts, I have already given some clear messages, that can help you clear out both the beginning and the ending. But apart from forming that basic understanding, there is another challenge that we will have to face. And that is: we need to be able to recognise the past understandings of that same role. This may be tricky, as these are still integrated in habits, quotes, anecdotes, and in other little parts of our lives.
To aid this part, here is the overview of views on leadership that were prevalent in the recent past. There are two main sources for this article: Daft’s The Leadership Experience and Northouse’s Leadership: Theory and practice.
A leadership century
A leadership century. Or a management century. It is 20th century in which scientific approach to management and leadership really began and transpired. Till that time, a view was one from an ancient time. And as it became a topic of interest for researchers, that view gradually, but also drastically changed.
No. 1: Leadership means dominance
In the beginning of 20th century, researchers adopted a view on leadership that was a prevalent one throughout our ancient history. In light of that, leader is a person with some outstanding, almost superhuman capabilities. A person that is, as was often said, “larger than life” and is “cut from a different cloth”. It is an era of natural born leaders.
What we now have to look into is, what was expected of a leader. That is: why they were thinking in this way. At the conference in 1927 leadership was defined as follows: “leadership is the ability to impress your view on those led, and to induce obedience, respect, loyalty, and cooperation”. And the main word denoting leadership for the time? Dominance.
For long, leadership was seen mostly as a skill to wield power and to dominate over other people. A skill of a person that is able to arrange others by own will, put everyone into place, and make everyone cooperate in a way this is needed. It is a time of so-called Great man theories.
No. 2: Leadership means persuasion
There was one thought in particular that I see as an indicator of a first immense turnaround. “Leadership by persuasion must be distinguished from leadership by coercion. First one is leadership, and the second one is drivership.”
In 1930s and 1940s views make a bit step to another direction. Asserting dominance and power over others is in fact not leadership. Leadership is inherently connected to some shared cause. And a recognised necessary ability is persuasion.
First, this ability derives from personal traits or qualities. Thus, a leader is someone, who has personal traits, that make him highly persuasive. A focus is still on an individual and a leader is still considered to be natural born. Yet, the expectation for that role is a changed one. This is an era of personality traits theories.
Second, persuasion is created by certain tasks or acts a leader performs. Leadership is now much closer to being a craft that can be learnt or thought. It is a set of activities a person does. Descriptions of a leadership role turn up and get more and more developed. It is an era of behavioural theories.
There is also a third piece to that chapter of the story: the so-called contingency or situational theories. It is seen and recognised, that some leaders perform well in some conditions, and others perform well in other conditions. What this means implies, is that there are no universally great leaders or at least no such leadership approaches. A good leader needs to be able to assess the situation and act accordingly.
No. 3: Leadership means motivating
Everything we do is a consequence of a motivation in us. In previous eras, major ways to motivate were reward and punishment systems that were part of a so-called scientific management. It was an era of a very rational and engineering-like approach to leadership. And if was enough when a goal was efficiency in production and obedience by all workers. But now there comes a new era and a new big twist.
A twist that happens is linked to a need to provide a better quality. Workers, that are persuaded into going along with a course set, do the task you demand from them. A transactional relationship is set in place, and workers accomplish their tasks to receive a value in form of a payment. But that sort of approach is not enough if you want to produce quality. Here you need to go a step further.
To raise quality, you need creativity and innovation. To have creativity and innovation, you need higher input of effort and energy, and this dignifies a need for higher motivation levels. And if you need higher motivation levels, that means higher personal (also emotional) inclusion of workers and therefore you need to address higher level needs. And this is what is expected of a leader at this point.
To achieve that, one of the central organisational trends becomes a trend of empowering members of organisations. Enable them to make decisions and co-create a shape of an organisation. Leader’s task becomes one to create a vision that will mean something to all members and will inspire them for giving in efforts and energy, and to shape a culture that will enable an attainment of this vision.
This is an era of influence theories.
No. 4: Leadership means engaging
So, we have come to the now. I am sure you know this one view well from all my previous writings. Leadership is a role in an organisation. One that is meant to facilitate everybody in their endeavours in an organisation and include everyone into actively pursuing the set mission and vision. And the most important skills are those from a field of building commitment, building relationships, encouraging authenticity, etc.
Theories prevalent in this era are called relational theories.
Conclusion
A walk through a management or a leadership century will give you an insight into steps and turns that leadership understanding took in a bit more than hundred years of scientific attendance and exploration. You will see, that many countries or communities of the world still stick to a great man view that disengages and puts into shadows a big majority of people. You will be able to recognise traces of theories in words people say and life-lessons they share with you.
Many leaders are caught into the transition between practices and principles that defined the industrial era and the new reality of the 21st century. /…/ It is difficult for many leaders to let go of the methods and practices that have made them successful in the past.
Richard L. Daft in The Leadership Experience (6Ed.)
If you have a goal to share burden. If you have a goal to engage members of an organisation and to encourage engagement and responsibility. If you want to foster creativity, and innovation, and all other outcomes that I talk about here … Well, that is what new paradigm leadership brings and what all this knowledge is created for.
Paradim 