See the New View
Let's consider the state of present-day leadership thinking. People are confused by the vast amount of leadership information available to them. That's not surprising. Critics often describe leadership information as being many conflicting frameworks that fail to deliver a common, unifying view of what leadership is and how it should be practiced. Over time, we've sliced and diced leadership in many ways, and we've been guilty of trying to keep a complex subject simple. I'm bothered by the split between academic and popular approaches to leadership; very popular authors and trainers frequently make claims beyond what the research can support. The bottom line is that there's a lot of leadership snake oil being sold.
Two common views of leadership influence how we understand leadership and teach people about it. Some people view leadership as a function of personality, suggesting that it derives from traits and characteristics that enable individuals to influence others. Others believe that leadership represents a kind of process that people engage in to influence others. People have used both perspectives to create very individualistic approaches that have dominated our study and practice of leadership.
There is growing agreement that a new leadership mindset is emerging, one that is shifting the field from a traditional model of leadership to a new view that makes better sense for modern organizations. The traditional model centered on a person, the designated leader, basing leadership on position power. Historically, we thought of leadership as behaviors that one person, the leader, did to or for others. The new model, on the other hand, sees leadership not so much as a capacity of individual people, but as a capacity of the organization. When viewed this way, leadership needs to be relational, based on shared power, and more of a joint or collaborative process.
The traditional leadership paradigm focused on goal attainment, or getting things done through leadership. The new paradigm focuses on collaboration that enables interdependent decision making. When we think of leading this way, responsible leadership becomes a social and ethical practice that depends on interaction between people. One big change is that this philosophy differs dramatically from traditional thoughts on leadership that typically focus on followers only as subordinates. When you think about leadership as a shared, interactive capacity of the organization, you realize that “leader” and “follower” are not fixed roles, but roles that migrate around the outfit as people influence one another's decisions.
It appears that people increasingly are shifting the conventional view of effective leadership from traditional, individualistic approaches toward more shared or collaborative models. Evidence, including recent surveys by the Center for Creative Leadership, suggests that a fundamental shift in our leadership paradigm is occurring in society. According to the center, people and organizations have changed their basic understanding of what constitutes leadership. Their findings are consistent with a recent body of scholarly thinking, suggesting that people are shifting away from traditional, individualistic views on leadership toward perspectives that see leadership as a process that everyone in the organization engages in.
In fact, leadership experts suggest that the traditional leader-centric framework is proving increasingly irrelevant in contemporary organizations, and view leadership as a system and a characteristic of the organization rather than of individuals. For example, noted leadership researchers Jay Conger and Craig Pearce describe leadership as a “dynamic, interactive influence process among individuals in work groups in which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group goals.” Conger and Pearce are representative of contemporary leadership scholars who increasingly suppose that multiple team members may enact informal leadership, even when the organization designates a “leader.”
Too many people still think the person that an organization appoints to a position of authority is a leader. I encourage Wildfire readers to adopt the view that a leader is a person engaged in the process of leadership; in other words, influencing people in their work group, and allowing people in the work group to influence them, so that they lead one another to the achievement of the group's purpose.
I often admonish those who confuse bosses, supervisors and managers with leaders. Just because your organization appoints you into a position of leadership does not mean that you are leading. With this view of leadership, you are leading if you are influencing others successfully with the objective of achieving the group's mutual purposes — regardless of your position in the organization or theirs'.
Mike DeGrosky is chief executive officer of the Guidance Group, a consulting organization specializing in the human and organizational aspects of the fire service. He also serves as an adjunct instructor in leadership studies at Fort Hays State University. His interests include leadership, strategy, and bringing the concepts of learning organizations and high-reliability organizing alive in fire organizations. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. focused on organizational leadership. He can be reached at mtd@rainierconnect.com.
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