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ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP.
Term Paper ID:23743
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Essay Subject:
Examines changing theories, practices, public & corp. views, examples, styles, impact on employees, leaders vs. managers.... More...
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8 Pages / 1800 Words
10 sources, 15 Citations,
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Paper Abstract:
Examines changing theories, practices, public & corp. views, examples, styles, impact on employees, leaders vs. managers.
Paper Introduction:
Not much more than a generation ago, in the heyday of the organization-man culture, the idea of leadership seemed to have hardly any major place in the conceptualization of American business. The days of individualistic tycoons in the grand manner, like Henry Ford, were far in the past, and the modern age of the entrepreneur was yet to come. The chairmen or CEOs of large corporations were scarcely household names in the 1950s and 1960s, and they are all but wholly forgotten now. The organization, or to give it an even statelier name, the institution, was all. The very terms "management" and "administration" convey an institutional flavor. One rose in an institution by being a good functionary, and even at the top one remained a functionary.
Today, a generation later, we have come to speak again of
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[7]Ibid., 3-4. Values-Based Leadership:Rebuilding Employee Committment, Performance, and Productivity. [11]Ibid., 134-45. This corresponds all too well with the experience of business inrecent years. [12]Marcia Lynn Whicker, Toxic Leadership: When Organizations Go Bad(Westport, CN: Quorum Books, 1996), 11. Occasionally we find characterizations of leadership that rise abovethe platitudes. The leader's job is to letthem get on with it, with minimal interference and wasted effort. Whether GM, or Microsoft, or any firm survives seems now to dependvery much on the quality of its leadership. The corporationof 4 years ago was imagined as a machine, rather like an assembly line; itreceived standard inputs and produced standard outputs. Theformer are "good, moral leaders," while the second class are "self-absorbed, egotistical," and the last group are "maladjusted, malcontent,malevolent, even malicious."[12] We can easily grasp what makes for a badboss, it is harder to be clear in our minds what makes for a good one. After some thought, he added, 'We think the next issue is LEADERSHIP.'"[2]All of which, of course, raises the question, what is leadership, and morespecifically, what are the characteristics of successful leaders? Howard Gardner, in his book Leading Minds, identifies two types ofleaders, the direct and the indirect, characteristic examples being WinstonChurchill and Albert Einstein. For example, Susan and Thomas Kuczmarski,using their own marriage vows as a model of mutual committment in anorganization, list such characteristic traits as "consideration of others,""belief in pluralism," "open and expressive communications," and soforth.[5] There is something of the platitude in such statements; we mayall agree that these are good ideas, in management as in marriage, but ifthey could be readily followed there would be a much smaller market forboth management consultants and marriage counsellors. But an obvious lesson implicit in this distinction is that oneof the tasks of the direct leader is to be aware of the existence of theother sort. New York: John Wiley, 1995.Whicker, Marcia Lynn. But just how to do so is another matter, and one not easilyaddressed. Today we wouldmake the analogy to a computer, which may at any time have to run entirelynew software, and even have its physical components replaced by new ones atfrequent and unpredictable intervals. Or rather, though easily enough addressed--the sameprescriptions come out of book after book--it seems to be something muchmore easily said than done. [1 ]Don Dinkmeyer and Daniel Eckstein, Leadership by Encouragement(Delray Beach, FL: St. Competition andtechnological change have rendered the stately bureaucratic organization ofthe 195 s and 195 s obsolete. New York:Basic Books, 1995.Glasser, William. Edwards Deming toExplain Both What Quality Is and What Lead-Managers Do to Achieve It.New York: HarperBusiness, 1994.Heil, Gary; Parker, Tom; and Tate, Rick. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.Pearce, Terry. Gary Heil, Tom Parker,and Rick Tate, in their book Leadership and the Customer Revolution, tellof being on a plane with The president of a well-known training and consulting company. Not much more than a generation ago, in the heyday of theorganization-man culture, the idea of leadership seemed to have hardly anymajor place in the conceptualization of American business. Managers seek order and control and are almost compulsively addicted to disposing of problems even before they understand their potentialsignificance.[14]This summarization fits very well with our sense of the difference betweenthe requirements of leadership in the present-day business world and thosethat seemed adequate in the organizational era of thirty or forty yearsago. New York: Oxford University, 1996.Spears, Larry C., ed. [4]Larry C. His focus is on quality, and the fact is that workerscan do their work better than the leader can. Kuczmarski, Values-Based Leadership:Rebuilding Employee Committment, Performance, and Productivity (EnglewoodCliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995), 4. Leadership by Encouragement.Delray Beach, FL: St. Theorganization, or to give it an even statelier name, the institution, wasall. Accordingly, the first step toward authenticspeech is to identify and clarify your personal foundation values, thethemes that underlie and support the changes you wish to lead."[15] Buthow does one learn authenticity? Today, a generation later, we have come to speak again of leadership. By leadership we seemimplicitly to mean not the successful following of established practices,but the ability to respond to circumstances, circumstances that may changeabruptly and in unpredictable ways. To Jean Lipman-Blumen, as she writes in her book The Connective Edge,American work culture embodies a complex mixture of individualism,cooperation, and authoritarianism.[9] We play team sports and admire teamspirit, but we still give the award (and the mega-salary) to the "mostvaluable player." Our ideal remains the tough, no-nonsense frontiersman,the tough straight talker, not the facilitator. After all, the whole premise of free-market economics is that success cannot be planned by some set of generalrules. Marcia LynnWhicker, in a book evocatively entitled Toxic Leadership, characterizes therespective traits of trustworthy, transitional, and toxic leaders. Why? According to Heil, Parker, and Tate, "we must first face thefact that we've been better at gaining the compliance of the workforce thanat building their committment.[13] In reading all the advice about howleaders should listen and encourage, instead of giving orders, one forms amental picture of middle managers attending seminars where they learn tomouth the new slogans as a form of political correctness, then go back totheir offices and continue to manage in the old ways. Thus, for example, according to Larry Spears, discussing RobertK. These are notdistinct and separate qualities; instead they flow from one another; onesets an example by encouraging others to do their best, and encourages themto do so by setting an example. In effect, Sifonis and Goldberg seem to imply, leaders areborn, not made. Corporations on a Tightrope:Balancing Leadership, Governance, and Technology in an Age of Complexity. We no longer imagine that because GeneralMotors cranked out so many cars off the assembly line last year that it isinevitable that it will be able to crank out so many next year, or that itwill find buyers for them unless they measure up. Toxic Leaders: When Organizations Go Bad.Westport, CN: Quorum Books, 1996.----------------------- [1]John G. Thus, leadership has become all the rage, and discussion ofleadership has become not a cottage industry but a full-size industry,grinding out books and articles by the hundreds. [15]Terry Pearce, Leading Out Loud: The Authentic Speaker, the CredibleLeader (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995), 25.----------------------- 11 [8]Ibid., 7. New York: Van NostrandReinhold, 1995.Kuczmarski, Susan Smith and Thomas D. If you are the CEO of a software firm, your most basic taskmay be to recognize that the most important person at the firm is notnecessarily you yourself, but the software engineer who comes up with thefirm's most innovative ideas. One rose in an institution by being a goodfunctionary, and even at the top one remained a functionary. Experience proved otherwise. Leadership and the CustomerRevolution: The Messy, Unpredictable, and Inescapably Human Challenge ofMaking the Rhetoric of Change a Reality. For allthe literature, through the 198 s and into the 199 s, about "participatory"management and inclusive styles of leadership, we still seem to fall backon the authoritarian style of the old-fashioned boss. "If he's successful, we think 'What a chancy, risky guy,' but if he fails, we think he's a sociopath."[1 ]The mark of the entrepreneur, in the popular culture, is not only success,but that, like the hero of the old Frank Sinatra song, "he did it his way." Dinkmeyer and Eckstein go on to characterize the distinction between"discouraging" and "encouraging" leaders.[11] These distinctions are theones we come to expect in reading the literature on leadership;discouraging leaders are those who don't listen, think they know more thananyone else, and snap out orders; encouraging leaders are those who listen,seek out the knowledge of others, and work to persuade. [3]Howard Gardner, Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership (New York:Basic Books, 1995), 6. Lucie Press, 1996), 48. [13]Heil, Parker, and Tate, 197. The days ofindividualistic tycoons in the grand manner, like Henry Ford, were far inthe past, and the modern age of the entrepreneur was yet to come. Greenleaf's theory of servant-leadership, "servant-leadership emphasizesincreased service to others, a holistic approach to work, a sense ofcommunity, and shared decision-making powers."[4] Spears and Greenleafspeak of servant-leadership as something new, but in fact it is quite old;since the Middle Ages, the formal motto of the Popes has been servusservorum Dei, the servant of the servants of God. It is likely that as many people recognize the name of Bill Gates asrecognize the name of Microsoft; perhaps more do. In his view, the characteristic of a leader is that he or sheis a persuasive--because authentic--speaker. [5]Susan Smith and Tomas D. Churchill exerted his influence in a direct way, through the stories he communicatedto various audiences; hence, I term him a direct leader. According to John Sifonis and Beverly Goldberg, "leaders today arebeing forced by a combination of forceful stakeholders and economicpressure to grow the profits of their organizations, without growing theirorganizations permanently."[1] That is to day, new organizational boxes orlayers of management are--due to hard experience--no longer regarded asadequate responses to the challenges of the marketplace. Einsteinexerted his influence in an indirect way, through the ideas he developedand the ways that those ideas were captured in some kind of a theory or treatise; hence, he qualifies as an indirect leader.[3] It may be said that for the purposes of this discussion, our primaryconcern is with direct leaders, that is, those who are "in charge" in someformal or at least informal sense, as opposed to indirect leaders ofinfluence. Reflections on Leadership: How Robert K.Greenleaf's Theory of Servant Leadership Influenced Today's TopManagement Thinkers. If any one idea emerges from the recent literature on businessleadership, it is that the leader is a person who serves by setting anexample, and by calling forth the utmost effort of others. In his book The Control Theory Manager, psychologist William Glasseroffers the startling proposition that "if we look at our successfulcompanies, we will find that they have taken managing for quality veryseriously. We should not besurprised if this is not the case. However, as he gloomily admitsnear the outset, efforts to import "Japanese-style" quality management intoAmerican firms have seldom been successful,[8] even though the theoryitself is not Japanese in origin, but was invented by an American. But what Glasser has in mind issomething subtler. Indeed, discussions on leadership are in general much more convincingin their portrayal of bad leadership than ofgood leadership. Leaders tolerate chaos and lack of structure ... Indeed, if thequalities of being comfortable with chaos are "deep in the psyche," then wehave to wonder if they can be learned at all, at least beyond earlychildhood. We can learn from books what plainly does notwork, but we can only work out for ourselves what does. One recent book proportedto teach the "Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun." Whatever the lessons,one wonders if a book called "Leadership Secrets of Mahatma Gandhi" wouldhave sold as many copies. [2]Gary Heil, Tom Parker, and Rick Tate, Leadership and the CustomerRevolution: The Messy, Unpredictable, and Inescapably Human Challenge ofMaking the Rhetoric of Change a Reality (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold,1995), 6. In doing so, they have discovered that they must focus on theworkplace far more than on the work" [author's italics].[6] At firstglance, this thought is slightly alarming; it sounds like the assumption ofconglomerate-builders in the 197 s that all business was the same, and ifyou knew how to mange, you could manage anything without knowing much aboutthe product. Thechairmen or CEOs of large corporations were scarcely household names in the195 s and 196 s, and they are all but wholly forgotten now. Yet it brings us no closer to knowing how to be a leader--which is,ultimately, what we hope works on leadership will tell us. This awareness in turn leads to another, the understanding that therole of a successful leader is not always to lead by himself or herself,but to identify and bring forward the person who can lead in a particularsituation. The free market is inherently hit-and-miss, and so in a sense arethe qualities of leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995.Sifonis, John G.; and Goldberg, Beverly. This seems close to the old actors'adage, "first you have to be sincere; when you can fake that, you've got itmade." In the end, we must be led to question whether indeed the qualitiesof leadership can be learned in any systematic way. The very terms "management" and "administration" convey aninstitutional flavor. Edwards Deming to ExplainBoth What Quality Is and What Lead-Managers Do to Achieve It (New York:HarperBusiness, 1994), xii. The current cult of entrepreneurship only strengthens these long-standing attitudes. Sifonis and Beverly Goldberg, Corporation on a Tightrope:Balancing Leadership, Governance, and Technology in an Age of Complexity(New York: Oxford University, 1996), 163. I see both Churchill and Einstein as leaders--as individuals who significantly influence the thoughts, behaviors,and/or feelings of others. "Speaking is the bridgebetween vision and action. BibliographyDinkmeyer, Don; and Eckstein, Daniel. Sifonis and Goldberg cite Abraham Zaleznik, writing twentyyears ago in words they find prophetic: A crucial difference betweenmanagers and leaders lies in the conceptions they hold, deep in their psyches, of chaos and order. Glasser draw his fundamental distinction between the "boss" and the"lead-manager,"[7] that is, between the manager who tries to give commandsand the manager who affirmatively leads. [14]Sifonis and Goldberg, 164-65. Lucie Press, 1996.Gardner, Howard. The Connective Edge: Leading in anInterdependent World. Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership. [9]Jean Lipman-Blumen, The Connective Edge: Leading in anInterdependent World (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996), 46-76. [6]William Glasser, The Control Theory Manager: Combining the ControlTheory of William Glasser with the Wisdom of W. The leader's task is to facilitate, or, to use a plainer word,to serve. Leading Out Loud: The Authentic Speaker, the CredibleLeader. The Control Theory Manager: Combining the ControlTheory of William Glasser with the Wisdom of W. EnglewoodCliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995.Lipman-Blumen, Jean. Hetold us that his company was trying to figure out what products they were going to sell after 'TotalQuality' had run its course. Spears, Reflections on Leadership: How Robert K.Greenleaf's Theory of Servant-Leadership Influenced Today's Top ManagementThinkers (New York: John Wiley, 1995) 3-4. Quoting Miles Hardy, authors Don Dinkmeyer and DanielEckstein characterize entrepreneurs as follows: "The entrepreneur is usually described as someone who is exploitative, tends to be aggressive, tends to take advantage of the situation," notes Hardy .... Terry Pearce, in his book Leading Out Loud, brings leadership downfrom the vague realm of ideals to the everyday experience of directinteraction. A leader is not necessarily the person "in charge" in a formal sense.
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