What is leadership?
Leadership is the process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it, and the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectives. — Gary Yukl
What is leadership? There is no single definition that fully describes what leadership is and Yukl’s statement only provides a starting point to learn more about it. Why you might ask? Leadership manifests itself in so many different situations and takes different forms. So where one definition fits another might not.
Leadership … is one of the most over-theorized, over-researched, and empirically messy areas of management and organization theory, with a clear lack in unity of perspectives or approaches — Stewart R Clegg, Martin Kornberger, Tyrone Pitsis
Instead of trying to define leadership let’s take a look at the history of leadership and some perspectives of leadership. A theory is a tool that contributes one way of understanding complex situations and as mentioned by Clegg et al., leadership is over-theorized. Therefore, by understanding the evolution of leadership studies one might better understand leadership.
A brief look at the history of leadership theory
Leadership itself is probably just as old as mankind. However, scientific leadership studies started in the early 1900. Leadership studies kicked off by examining personality traits and how those impacted leader success. The research conducted was not able to identify a set of traits that would lead to guaranteed success. Therefore, around the 1950s researchers took a new approach. They started looking at leadership behavior and if certain actions could lead to leadership success. Two decades later in the 1970s researchers started to look at situational leadership. Instead of looking at the leader as an isolated individual, they started to study the environment that they were in which included the followers.
Towards a more integrative approach
The 1980s marked a new era for leadership studies as they started to look at integrative approaches instead of trying to isolate a certain trait or behavior. People started to look into charismatic leadership, value-based leadership, and transformational leadership. From the year 2000 and onward the leadership domain has grown in all directions. Fields like strategic leadership, authentic leadership, esthetical leadership, coaching, and innovation leadership to name a few became popular perspectives of leadership. Today there are even studies exploring how biology and genetics affect leadership. Consequently, one could say that leadership encompasses so much yet so little.
Two different views on leadership
Traditional leadership has its basis in a leader-to-follower model. It looks at the leader as an individual that influences followers through traits, actions, values, etc. The followers have traits of their own that make them good followers and productive workers. It is the leader’s job to facilitate follower growth and steer them in the right direction.
A more recent view on leadership is collectivistic leadership or often called relational leadership. This view doesn’t isolate the leader as an individual but focuses on the group and collective authority. There are different models like self-managed teams, shared leadership, distributed leadership and more. All of these models have different nuances of how they work, but the core perspective is that decision making is a shared responsibility. Meaning that collectivistic leadership creates a horizontal approach instead of a top-down approach.
Leadership influence
To start I just want to create a distinction between management and leadership. The job of the management is to focus on order and predictability. They often work with closed problems where you can follow standard procedures to solve them. Leadership aims to create organizational change and navigate complex situations. The problems that leaders face rarely have a single method or a guideline that they can follow. They have to pave their own path. The line between management and leadership is rather blurred and a leader can be a manager and vice-versa, but it is important to remember that there is a distinction.
Let’s take a look at how leaders can pave their path. Direct leadership is when you influence the counterpart directly through meetings, dialog, etc. While indirect leadership is when you influence through cascading hierarchy or setting organizational values and/or culture. To better understand leadership we have to understand what factors a leader can influence:
- What objectives and strategies they should pursue
- The motivation of team members to achieve certain objectives
- Trust and cooperation between team members
- Organizational structure and coordination
- Resource allocation
- The development of team member skills and confidence
- Learning and knowledge sharing
- Enlistment of support from external actors
- Formal structure, program, and systems
- The shared beliefs and values of members
Lastly, I want to leave you with this. Leadership is procedural yet relational. Leadership is contextual and emotional. Leadership is taking charge of situations where you don’t know if you’ll ever succeed. It‘s situations where there aren’t a single correct solution, but rather a plethora of possible paths to take. Still, someone has to rise up and take charge. Be it one or many, that is what I call leadership.
