It is about half a year after I wrote my last article about leadership. Since then I’ve been dealing with other topics: namely authenticity, idealism, assertiveness, and ethics. But I am returning to this Basics of leadership chapter to circle out one important perspective on leadership role. So, to do that, let just post that most basic question again: what does it mean to be a leader? And an addition: to be a leader in today’s democratic world, in a world, where we want to foster social inclusion and care for an all-around high-quality life.
Let’s repeat some basics
It is very important to know what we are talking about when we use a word leader or leadership. It has become a very attractive word and made an image that many aspire to. Thus, content of that image determines how many behave, what skills they attain, what values they develop within themselves, etc. It really counts for a lot.
That calls for clarity and precision. I am quite confident to say that we don’t have the best models and with it do not have best aspirations as a society. To be a leader has become a very fancy thing to hear about yourself. Or to have power or ability to influence people. To make others follow you. This attracts people who love power and having influence over others. But that is not who a modern leader in a democratic society should be. “Power over” is a negative power. “Power with” is a positive kind of power. Former one overshadows the crowd; latter one lifts or elevates it.
Leader in democratic thought pattern
I myself, after about ten years of reading theories and dealing with topic of leadership, use a term “leader” to name a very specific role. I don’t see that word describing a tennis player who reached the top of world rankings. I don’t like to use it to describe the best doctor in a certain department or the best player on court in a basketball team. This sort of habit derives from thinking that a leader sets an example for others and others should (possibly even uncritically) follow that example. It also steams from an ancient theory of Mr. Carlyle that wrote leaders are cut from a different cloth and are just plainly different from other “average” people. But those theories got disproven. They should belong to the past.
To be a leader is to have a very specific role. To be a leader is to do four things: build commitment, built congruence, activate potentials, and facilitate others. That is a leader we need in any organisation and any community in nowadays world. Leadership is one role in an organisation or community that is there to support others. To make others work better, to make it easier for them, to clear all the obstacles so everyone can do what’s his or her job.
Performance builders and institution builders
So, we are talking about a leader in an organisation or in a community. He or she is not the best doctor or best basketball player, but is the one who can inspire people to be invested, to be motivated, to take full responsibility (or what some call ownership) over their work. A leader is someone, who sees commitment, and congruence, and activation and inclusion, and motivation as a result of his or her work. It is somebody, who is proficient in field of psychology and creation of organisational culture so he or she doesn’t run away from most vital challenges that define leadership role (many leaders run away from difficulties in this area; simply, because we are not used to seeing it as a “job description” for a leader).
Now I want to offer you a very important piece of knowledge. A differentiation between two types of leaders: performance builders and institution builders. It is very important and big if you want to work in good working environment. If you are up to defining very clearly what leader should do and what a leader should provide for an organisation. It makes a difference between having leaders as superhuman figures responsible for all that is going on in a system, and those leaders that are human, authentic, that have “power with” people, and are responsible for creating a quality, obstacles free working environment.
Performance builders are leaders who are mainly focused on the results a company or another organisation is creating. They like to design great controlling schemes to make sure that those results are always reached. They create streams of information that provide them with constantly knowing what is going on in that entire system. The problem is that result is more important than institutions that (especially in the long run) bring those results. As they want to keep the result (or the performance) at all cost, they would also neglect and crush vital structures that constitute a healthy and well working organisation (what we then experience as unorganised working environment and presence of working obstacles).
Second type are institution builders. In institutional economic theory institutions are elements of a system that heavily influence certain other elements of that same system. In other words: institutions are all the fundamentals that determine how we feel, how we work, and how successful we are in organisations where we work. Institution builders are leaders who understand very well what brings (especially long-term) success in an organisation. They are not primarily focused on success but on sources of success. So, they spend their time nurturing relationships, so everyone gets along well, providing the necessary information, so everyone knows what he or she needs to do respective job well, making sure reward system in just, so we are rewarded for our efforts and contributions, and so on.
When leaders are performance builders, they don’t have a clearly defined role. They make decisions all over the organisation. They take and hold responsibility over results which are never actually entirely in their hands; so, they are likely to control fiercely and to be authoritarians. When leaders are institution builders, their role is defined with a clearer frame. They are professionals who deal with structures and other elements of the organisation, like organisational structure, organisational culture, establishing communication and information channels, establishing a feedback and reward system, establishing a career development pathways, and so on and so forth.
In conclusion …
Working with purpose and keeping your values is possible, but someone needs to be responsible to make it possible. Leaders should not be those of Carlyle’s Great Man Theory. They are not heroes knowing each and every thing, or having all the right answers (well, because no one is smart enough to have). Leaders should also not be responsible for results of the organisation, because that means being responsible for what somebody else does (which leads to control and authoritarian leadership). Leaders should be responsible for creating a quality working environment and enabling everyone included to take responsibility for respective role. This will attract not those who strive for “power over” people, but those who are experts in leadership, understand well what an organisation is and how it needs to be build, and who want to facilitate the work and performance of their colleagues in an organisation.
Paradim 