The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things...like characteristics of effective leaders

This is the third of three posts on leadership.  In the first, I wrote about my definition of leadership and in the second about the role of power in leadership.  In this one, I will be reflecting on the characteristics of effective leaders.  I defined leadership as influencing the behavior of other people in a way that fully respected their freedom and autonomy.  This may not be everyone's definition but it is the one that I have concluded best describes leadership, the kind of leadership we are sorely missing today.  People in formal leadership positions have the power to influence others based on the authority and prerogatives delegated to them by the organization.  But everyone has personal power bases deriving from their personal characteristics and capacities.  In general reliance on positional power alone is not an effective long term strategy for effective leadership.

Leadership has probably never been more important to our organizations and communities than it is today.  Our ability to take collaborative action has become central to our social and economic health.  Our notion of a leader as a strong individual who knows best, makes crucial decisions, and tells others what to do, is no longer consistent with our understandings of human behavior and our values of human dignity and freedom.  Our society’s mistrust of authority should not be confused with a mistrust of leaders.  We do and should mistrust leaders who do not respect our freedom and instead rely on authority, power, and manipulation.  We do and should mistrust leaders who are more interested in their personal success rather than the common good.  Our realization that leaders do not necessarily act in our best interests has made us less compliant to exercises of authority and more needful of true leadership.

Characteristics of Effective Leadership

Given these new realities, what can we say about true leaders, those who influence our behavior while fully respecting our freedom?  After four years of listening to graduate students reflect on their experience and to the leaders who shared their experience with us, I came to the following conclusions about the characteristics of leaders.  Think they are even more relevant today.

Leaders respect the dignity and worth of each follower

Two behaviors are key to this.  First, such leaders do everything possible to reduce status differentials in groups and communities.  Status based on socioeconomic factors and job titles can probably never be eliminated from human groups, but leaders must work to de-emphasize those differentials rather than emphasize them.  Second, leaders must make clear by their behavior that they value and respect all followers, especially those who are less powerful, less healthy, less educated, younger, older, poorer, less skillful in communication, and different in race, language, religion, gender or sexual orientation from the majority.

No leader can successfully influence the behavior of other people unless they trust the leader.  The cornerstone of that trust is the confirmed belief that the leader values each follower and is guided by what is fair to all.

Leaders are learners.

They learn from success, but they especially learn from their failures to which they freely admit.  Leaders are constantly searching for the truth; they are open to reality even when that reality does not accord with their notions of what reality is or ought to be.  They can see things as they are and they are not frightened of the change which that view of reality will cause in their own thinking.  Leaders are not ideologues, though dictators typically are.

Leaders empower their followers.

The simplest way to understand the notion of empowerment is to appreciate that everyone in a group or community exercises leadership - not just the formal leader.  This occurs in an environment in which leadership is not seen solely as something which the elites do to the rest, but in which everyone can legitimately exercise influence over others.  Leaders must work diligently to create such a climate and to arrange the group or societal processes to nurture the leadership potential of all members, especially those who might be traditionally excluded from leadership.  This is not as much a question of sharing power as it is of developing the capacity of each follower to influence the behavior of others.  If empowerment is only seen as sharing power, one is acting out of a model of leadership that relies on coercion and manipulation because leaders can only share their positional power.

Leaders have a vision of how things can be different and better.

By definition, leaders are concerned about change.  If one is trying to influence the behavior of another, one does so out of some dissatisfaction with the current or likely behavior of the other.  One seeks to change that person’s behavior.  The direction and content of leadership behavior must be guided by a vision of how things can be not just different but better.  That vision of how things can be better must have the following characteristics.  There must be an authenticity about the vision based on a clear consistency with the leader’s own personal values - not just espoused values, but values which can be clearly seen in the leader’s personal behavior.  That vision must be clearly communicated in both the words and the personal behavior of the leader.  That vision must be drawn from the values of the followers.  That vision must draw people together around the fundamental values which give meaning to the lives of the individual members.  A charismatic leader is not someone who creates a vision and then uses it to lead people, but rather someone who draws on the values and meanings of the followers to articulate a common mission that provides meaning and direction to the group.

Leaders include rather than exclude.

Ken Blanchard, the author of the One Minute Manager, has articulated the reason for inclusion by quoting from a poster in an elementary school.  “None of us is as smart as all of us.”  The individualism that is deep in the American DNA can lead us to think that the important contributions as made by super individuals acting alone.  The reality is that important contributions are made by people working in teams.  The more talented and motivated the members of the team, the more effective is the team's work.  Effective leaders must facilitate the contributions of all followers.  Only in this way will the group or community be able to identify its true interest and goals and be able to work effectively to achieve them.

Leaders do their homework.

Leadership is always task-specific.  Leaders influence other people about specific issues, challenges, behaviors.  To influence other people, therefore, leaders must do their homework on the issues or challenges.  Leaders must develop and understand information on the specific issue and must be aware of the attitudes and positions of those they desire to influence.  Leaders who do not do their homework often are forced to rely on raw authority and coercive power which moves them away from effective leadership.

Effective leaders must be able to deal with ambiguity, uncertainty, and conflict

The number and rate of cultural and technological changes that characterize our world require leaders whose intellectual outlook and personal character enable them to operate effectively in a confused and conflicted situation.  This ability to act in such situations communicates a sense of confidence and potency to followers.

Idealism and Pragmatism - A Necessary Combination

In short, effective leaders today can be characterized as pragmatic idealists.  They must have a clear sense of values about the importance of all individuals and have the skills and understanding needed to influence the behavior of others while fully respecting their freedom.  It is not enough to be a visionary.  It has often been observed that there is no shortage of people with good, even revolutionary ideas; there is a shortage of people with good ideas who are able and willing to do the hard, pragmatic work of putting those ideas into practice.  If I have a vision of how things ought to be, but I am not willing to engage in the work of leadership - listening, learning, empowering, taking risks, and driving relentlessly for real implementation - I will be irrelevant, a “hopeless idealist,” “a fuzzy-thinking liberal,” or worse.  On the other hand, if I am skillful at implementing ideas without a clear sense of direction, I will become a “technocrat,” able to get things done, but not knowing what things to do or not do.

Conclusion

Never before in my lifetime, I have felt the lack of effective leadership in most areas of our life:  church, business, nonprofit organizations, and government.  As it always is, a crisis highlights the failings of leadership.  As Warren Buffet has wisely observed, "You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out."  In the church, it was the sexual abuse coverups.  In business, it was the frauds and shady dealings leading up to the Great Recession of 2008.  In the nonprofit world, it was the financial misappropriation of funds and failure to protect children.  In government, it was the pathetic efforts of the clown car Trump administration to protect us from COVID-19.  Americans can and do disagree on politics and government policies but surely all Americans can agree that we deserve competent and effective leadership from those who would present themselves as leaders.  

I believe these characteristics of effective leadership should be the criteria by which we judge those who hold formal leadership positions:

Effective leaders

1. respect the dignity and worth of individuals
2. are constantly learning
3. empower followers and create a culture of leadership
4. have a vision of how things can be different and better and effectively communicate that vision
5. include rather than exclude
6. do their homework
7. effectively deal with ambiguity, uncertainty, and conflict
8. must be pragmatic idealists

These are the standards of leadership to which we as employees, citizens, members, and clients have a right.  As employees, members, and clients, we very often do not have a voice in the selection of those who would lead us.  But in government we do.  Elections and politics are our ways to have a voice in that selection.  Before we look at policies and partisan issues, we need to look at the quality of the leadership candidates will provide us.   This has never been more important.

The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things...like leadership and power

In the previous blog, I wrote about our current need for leadership on all levels but especially at the federal.  I also defined leadership as the process of influencing others while fully respecting their freedom.  While crisis situations can call for quick and decisive decisions, long term change relies on influence so that followers engage in the desired actions because they want to and not because they are ordered to do so.  In this post, I will discuss "power" and its role in leadership as I have defined it.

  

At first glance, power seems incompatible with respecting the freedom and autonomy of followers.  Often our experience with those who hold power is they use it to compel obedience.  Power seems to inevitably lead to a command and control approach to leadership.  That probably says more about the leaders we have experienced rather than the nature of leadership.  Power is one of those words that have multiple meanings and uses.  It comes from the Latin" posse" which means "to be able."  Power is the energy that enables someone to exert leadership.  It is the engine of leadership.

If leadership is the attempt to influence others, then power is the leader's potential for leadership.  A  leader has assets to use in leadership.  These assets fall into two categories:  positional power and personal power.  Another word that is handy here is "base."  Someone seeking to influence others has two power bases:  positional and personal.    Positional power comes from one's role in an organization.  For example, if I am a Director of Marketing, I have authority delegated to that position.  Also, I have power based on the relative importance and status of that function.  If I report to the CEO, I have more clout than if I report to a Vice President.  These are ex officio powers that an organization, group, or country grants to those who hold positions independent of the abilities and talents of the incumbent.  We can assume that the best people are selected for every job and that the talents match the authority of the position.  However, we have all had enough experience to realize that this is not always the case.  This same analysis applies to national and local governments as well.  Election to an office confers power to the incumbent quite apart from that person's actual talents and experience.  We hope for the best but are often disappointed.

Positional power is a function of the authority inherent in organizations and their governing structures.  Sometimes this power is limited and at other times quite expansive.  It all depends on the level and importance of the position and urgency of any threat.  In a democratic society, no position has absolute and unlimited power.   Laws, social norms, unions and associations, organizational culture and values, professionalization, and a general distrust of authority limit the positional power of leaders.

There are four positional power bases.  Coercive power is the perceived ability to force people to act in certain ways.  This is the rawest form of power.  It is the power of a dictator in a well established dictatorial system but it exists in all types of organizations.  An order from your boss with the implied threat that you will be fired if you do not obey relies on coercive power.  If you believe that the threat will be carried out, your compliance is being coerced.  

Connection power is the perceived association with influential people or organizations.  If I have a connection with powerful people in the organization, I carry some of their positional authority even if I do not formally do so.  It was well known that there were several fiefdoms in the Ford Motor Company during the reign of Henry Ford II as chairman and CEO.  Key Vice Presidents had shadow organizations of loyal operatives throughout the company.  These operatives had power over others based on their relationship with their respective vice president even outside their "home" organization.  Their power was a function of the power of their sponsoring vice president.    

Reward power is the perceived ability to provide things people would like or need to have.  These include salary, bonuses, titles, plum assignments, office location, reserved parking, expense accounts.  The list is endless.  If you control the allocation of these resources, you have enhanced power to influence others by rewarding the behavior you desire and withholding resources to punish behavior you do not want.  Finally,  legitimate power is based on the perception that it is appropriate for a leader to make decisions due to a title or position in the organization.  If you are the president of an organization, the members will generally accept decisions because you are the president, independent of any other factor.

Personal power is the extent to which leaders gain the confidence and trust of those people they are attempting to influence.  Unlike positional power which comes from an organization, personal power is granted by followers.  As with positional power, there are several personal power bases. 

Referent power is the perceived attractiveness of interacting with another person.  This is obviously a highly subjective power base because it relies on personal preference.  I may find someone very attractive and would enjoy spending time with him or her.  However, another person might have exactly the opposite reaction.  He or she would have more power to influence me than a person who just didn't like him or her.  There is no particular rhyme or reason to this.  It is just human preference.  Social psychologists study attractiveness a lot.  While there are no complete answers to this complex question, two factors appear to be key:  physical attractiveness and similarity.  The first has some gender differences (men can be tall but not women; men can be older but not women) but someone who is not physically attractive has less referent power.  Followers appear to be more open to leadership from people with whom they can identify in some way:  background, history, religion, geographic region, status, etc.  Referent power can be important to a leader but it generally cannot be increased or decreased as long as honesty and openness are valued.  What leaders can do, however, is to share their stories.  Political leaders are typically very adept at this kind of self-disclosure.

Information power is the perceived access to or possession of useful information.  This personal power base has become extremely important since the rise of the internet.  While the amount of data has increased beyond measure, information has become more elusive.  Raw data becomes information when meaning and significance become attached.  "Actionable" is the term du jour.  A person who has information who can present it in ways that everyone can understand has enhanced his or her ability to influence people.  Unfortunately, the amplification of the internet works as well for false information as for true.  Concocted conspiracy theories work about as well as well referenced and verified reports.  People have realized that appearing to have information works as well as actually having it.  A 2018 study found that only 25% of U.S. adults could correctly distinguish factual statements from personal opinion statements.  Further, the study found that political affiliation had an impact on the evaluation of politically charged statements.  In another study, only 9% of 15-year-olds could correctly distinguish between facts and opinions.  This wholesale confusion of facts and opinion has eroded this personal power base.  Your partisans agree with whatever you say which might make you feel good but actually impairs your ability to influence other people.

Expert power is the perception that the leader has relevant education, experience, and expertise.  In the cacophony of information, we look for experts.  We want to hear from people who have demonstrated expertise in the area of concern.  Or more precisely, we used to want that.  Expertise has become linked with elitism and often is rejected out of hand.  We are often left with dueling experts who rail at us with more opinions than facts.  This erodes our trust in each other under the guise of valuing ordinary people and common sense.  In my lifetime I have experienced two presidential elections in which the obviously more qualified candidate lost the election to relatively inexperienced newcomers:  George H. W. Bush and Hilary Clinton.  

A leader who has a clear vision of the future and can articulate it effectively can use this as a personal power base.  This power base offers hope of personal power beyond referent power.  When information power and expert power bases have become weakened, a person who has an understanding of what is going on and has a clear view of the next steps toward a future that will be better has the opportunity to exert influence on people's behavior.  Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren exemplify this.  Based on a diagnosis of the current social and economic circumstances, they articulated a future that would address these issues.

Personal power is a function of the character, intellect, and presentation of a leader, independent of his or her role in an organization.  Of course, the most effective leaders will combine both a leadership role in an organization and highly cultivated personal power bases.  But any individual can develop his or her power bases and thus his or her capacity for leadership.  In fact, leadership is often exercised independently of the organizational position of a person.  Members of a group other than the formal leader can use their referent, information, expert, and/or vision power bases to influence the behavior of others in the group.  The highest performing groups are typically those whose members are all exercising leadership and not dependent on the formal leader alone.  The most important task of a formal leader is to nurture and sustain the leadership capacity of every group member, to create a culture of leadership.  Uncritical loyalty to the formal leader is incompatible with this approach to leadership.

An effective leader cultivates and uses as many power bases as possible.  Given the challenges that formal leaders face today with the decline in public trust in institutions and authority,  smart leaders will work on his or her personal power bases.  So which is better:  position authority or personal authority?  Which power bases are better?  Since most agree that leadership is situational, it all depends.  But the most effective leaders develop their own personal power bases so they are not completely dependent on positional power.  The more leader depends on positional authority, the more problematic.  This is especially true for coercive and reward behavior.  The more one relies on either of these, the more one must resort to them.  As the legitimacy of coercion or the lack of rewards become evident, the ability to influence followers decays.  Long term compliance is more reliably built on personal power bases.

This has been the second of three blogs about leadership.  The first defined leadership and this one discussed power and its role in leadership.  My third and final blog on leadership will present lessons about leadership from my own experiences of exercising leadership and teaching a graduate course in leadership.

The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things...like leadership

Indeed, the time has come to talk of many things.  In Alice in Wonderland, Tweedledee and Tweedledum recite The Walrus and the Carpenter to Alice.  The Walrus and the Carpenter are strolling on the beach and find themselves at an oyster bed.  They decide to trick the young oysters in going for a walk along the beach with them, a walk that ends with the oysters becoming dinner for the two.  Midway through their walk, the Walrus says

The time has come,' the Walrus said,

      To talk of many things:

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —

      Of cabbages — and kings —

And why the sea is boiling hot —

      And whether pigs have wings.'

I am not sure what that list means but it did serve to distract the young oysters so they didn't realize what was happening to them.  An old oyster let the Walrus know that he was having none of this but the young oysters fell for it.   Let us not be distracted by nonsense in our national political life.  This is the time to talk about leadership because our challenges with COVID-19 highlight our nation's need for leadership.

As the world, our country and my state deal with a pandemic, the elected leader of the United States presents himself in daily briefings as a man unmoored from the standards that should guide the public behavior and statements of a leader, especially in a time of crisis and threat.  First, he says he has absolute and complete authority to tell the states, and by extension, everyone in the country what to do.  Then within days, he declares he is not responsible for anything.  He makes wild statements about improbable and even dangerous cures in a way he has honed over the years so that he takes no responsibility for the statements.  His speech is filled with "people say." "I've heard some people say." "Some people think." "Maybe it's true, maybe not.  We'll see."  He avoids taking a clear position so he can avoid any responsibility.  Or even more unsettling, he will contradict himself and then claim he never said what everyone heard and saw him say.  It always provides him with deniability if things turn out bad.  He can also claim he knew it before anyone else if it turns out well.  He seems obsessed with success and "winning" or at least with the appearance of success and winning.

Early in his career, he made himself into a celebrity by stimulating coverage on Page Six of the New York Post, basically a gossip page.  He did that by making outrageous statements about himself and others, statements he knew would be repeated in print regardless of their truth.  He even impersonated a media consultant to himself who would contact reporters and talk about "The Donald" in the third person.  The reporters knew who it was but repeated what he said anyway because it made such good gossip page reading.

He graduated from Page Six when he was cast in the lead role of The Apprentice and later The Celebrity Apprentice.  He went from a Manhattan-based notoriety to a national one as a leading CEO and business leader, not in reality but in a reality TV show.  Once he found Twitter, he was off and running.  He didn't change his tactics but they were amplified beyond anyone's imagination.  And now he is confronting a crisis.  And this crisis is not of his own making.  It is not a public relations creation to build his image or expand his reach.  It certainly gathers eyeballs but these eyeballs are looking for leadership, not entertainment.  What we now see is a man who has no idea of what a leader is or does other than WIN.

It is not his fault.  There are plenty of people who ascend to leadership positions without much of an idea about what leadership is or how to do it.  "I'm on top.  I have the supreme authority in this company, organization or country.  What I say, goes."  And that approach often works because people have gotten very good at letting leaders think they're in charge.  When a crisis arises, things can change quickly and radically.

If the crisis is dangerous and imminent and the leader is decisive and clear, people will tend to go along with whatever the leader says, even commands, at least in the short run.  But if neither of those conditions is true, it's a different ball game.  It won't work for the simple reason that people don't like to be told what to do.  Think about it.  Do you like to be told what to do?  I don't like it because it makes me feel like there is something wrong with me.  Does someone think I am so dumb that I need to be told what to do?  And having some in authority tell us what to do makes us feel impotent and no one likes that.

What a leader needs to do is get people to do what the leader wants voluntarily, not because someone told them to but because they genuinely want to do it.  If a leader wants a lasting and significant change in behavior, people need to do it themselves.  Leadership is the process of influencing people's behavior while fully respecting their freedom.  Let's take a look at this in more detail.

First, leadership is a process, not a one-time event.  Effective leaders can often seem repetitive.  They realize that not everyone hears the message the first time and some who do forget it in the turbulence of everyday lives.  Key themes and actions need to be said often and repeated in different settings.  That consistency can often be boring and a challenge to leaders with short attention spans or a need for immediate results.  Sometimes a crisis makes it feel like leadership needs to be immediate.  If we feel threatened we are more likely to want someone to take charge and tells us what to do.  In a crisis, Americans typically increase their support of whoever is President.  This crisis bump can be squandered if the actions and decisions of the leader are not seen as effective and in the common interest.

Second, leadership is a process of influencing, not command/obedience.  Effective leadership seeks not just short term compliance but a lasting change in behavior and that lasting change in behavior is in the hands of followers, not the leader.  We don't need leadership if everything is staying the same.  Most of us most of the time follow a set of rules about what to do.  If A happens, we do B.  Everyone does B and we have always been doing B.  And B works.  It is the appropriate response.  Sometimes, it happens that B doesn't work.  We may try it over and over again but it just doesn't work.  Now what?  We have to change but how, when, and why?  This is where leadership comes in.  If everything is working out just fine, management works quite well.  But adapting to change requires leadership.  This is especially true when the challenge is clear to leadership but it may be murky for the rest of us.

Third, effective leadership fully respects the freedom of followers.  In other words, leadership is not about coercion.  Sometimes coercion is needed because of the risk or speed of a threat.  But we need to clarify that it is not leadership even though the leader may be the one coercing.  There is a World War II maxim, "Nobody's smarter than 100 GI's."  A commander could issue orders and depending on the situation the troops would comply.  But if they didn't trust the commander or found the order not in their best interest, eventually, they would figure a way around the order.  They would often go to extreme lengths to let the commander think they were complying.  In Vietnam, infantry patrols would go out from fortified positions.  It was not unusual for them to stop when they got out of the eyesight of the commanders and decide whether they were going out on patrol or not.  It was called sandbagging and eventually led to outright mutiny or combat refusal.

It almost seems self-evident that leadership requires followers.  Good leadership requires good followers.  If no one is following, the leader is not very effective.  The ultimate test of effective leadership is the extent to which followers change their behavior in response to leadership.  To some leaders, it might seem that good followers do what they are told.  Good followers are obedient followers.  However, it turns out that good followers don't do what they told just because someone in authority tells them to.  Good followers are empowered and autonomous and make their decisions based on information, assessment, understanding, and vision.  These are the very same characteristics we want in a leader.  In the end, everyone one of us can exert leadership in relation to others.  The best leadership culture is one in which all members are capable of leadership and exert that leadership to achieve group goals.  The prime directive for those in formal leadership positions is to create and sustain a culture of leadership rather than see themselves as the only ones to lead.

But what exactly do leaders do?  And how does power figure into all this?  We will get into that in the next episode.