What Makes Us See Someone as a Leader?
For those interested in the study and practice of leadership: I’m pleased to say that our paper “What Makes Us See Someone as a Leader: A Field Theory Approach” has been published in Journal of Change Management: Reframing Leadership and Organizational Practice (JCM). The paper provides a rigorous exploration and explanation of how leadership emerges in the perception of others.
Most writing (and work) on “leadership”, both popular and scholarly, is actually about influence and managerial effectiveness. It doesn’t uncover the essence of leadership nor clearly explain leadership emergence, i.e., why someone shows up as a leader in the first place. Management and leadership are different social relationships, with different sources of power and engaging in different social actions. Each is critically important in its own right, but we need to understand the difference if we want to design them to happen and intervene to repair them when they break down. Leadership is a social phenomenon that can be theoretically explained as well as empirically studied, much as gravity is a physical phenomenon that can be similarly explained and studied.
Leaders engage, align, and mobilize people by meaningfully challenging, or meaningfully resisting challenges to, the status quo, and accumulate and wield non-coercive power in the process. Through their communication and actions, they induce others to see existing situations in a significantly altered light, compelling them to think and act differently to create a desired new reality. And no particular set of character traits, behavioral styles or other properties is uniquely suited to doing this.
Leadership power is conferred by those who follow (“from below”). In contrast, managers have coercive power conferred on them institutionally (“from above”), and are not paid to overthrow the status quo nor to tamper with the system stabilizers that maintain organizational equilibrium. Their job is largely to maintain stability and execute within the organizational system while continuously tweaking and incrementally improving it. Organizations can declare who is a manager, confer authority on them, and declare who reports to whom. But they can’t declare who is a leader – it’s presumptuous at best and demeaning at worst to those who are then deemed followers. And staff may very well view such declarations skeptically (at best) and cynically (at worst) – justifiably so – with corresponding organizational consequences. People don’t choose their managers, but they do choose their leaders. Managers sometimes can, and do, lead, but often not.
A few further thoughts:
leadership is not about occupation of a particular role (executive, managerial, political, religious, or other)
no one is universally “a leader”; leadership emergence is dependent on the situation
leadership is not inherently good, despite its common connotation as such; leaders can do good or evil, but the phenomenon itself is neither (just as gravity is neither good nor bad; it just is)
leadership isn’t always about change – sometimes it’s about resisting and preventing change
“leader” has (wrongly) supplanted the word “manager” in organizations
much of the non-academic leadership literature is replete with moralistic fallacies, declaring what the authors think leadership should be based on anecdotal experience rather than conceptually exploring and empirically testing how the phenomenon actually shows up in social situations, as a scientific approach demands
organizations are generally designed to suppress leadership emergence, not to encourage it
I hope our paper helps dispel some leadership myths and misconceptions and adds to a broader understanding that can be applied in practice.
Sincere thanks to my University of Waterloo Management Science and Engineering colleagues and co-authors, Professor Frank Safayeni and Dr. Ahmad Tanehkar, for their camaraderie in this project. Thanks as well to the peer reviewers and editors at JCM for their insightful critiques and suggestions and helping us craft a better manuscript through the various revisions.