Tag Archives: Purpose of Leadership

Leadership

The Purpose of Leadership

The purpose of leadership is to get people to move forward to a place where they would not have gone alone. Leaders define a vision of the future, rally followers to their cause, and inspire them to take action to move in that direction.   The best leaders inspire their followers to join them on their journey using influence rather than coercion.

Perhaps the best way to understand the purpose of leadership is to look at what famous leaders and commentators have said to describe it themselves. They offer insights on the purpose of leadership based on their own deep experience as leaders.  Here is how some famous leaders have sought to capture it in their own words:

 

  • Dwight D. Eisenhower, the famous World War II General and President of the United States, defined leadership in the following way: “Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.”
  • Former First Lady Roselynn Carter described leadership in a similar way:  “A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.”
  • Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte concisely articulated the purpose of leadership by asserting, “A leader is a dealer in hope.”
  • Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, former president of Notre Dame University said, “The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision.”
  • Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said this about the purpose of leadership:  “The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.”

 

Although each of these leaders has expressed the purpose of leadership in a slightly different way, there is a common theme: leadership is about direction and transferring energy from the leader to their followers to take action.  Now look at what some famous leadership commentators have said about leadership, and how they correctly distinguish leadership from management.  They have dedicated their lives studying leadership and contributed these insights as thought leaders on the subject:

 

  • Peter Drucker, esteemed business consultant and university professor said: “Management is doing things right; Leadership is doing the right things.”
  • Stephen Covey, author of the best selling book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective people had a similar view:  “Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.”
  • Warren Bennis, widely recognized leadership expert and university professor stated: The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and why.

 

In the end, leaders are measured by their results.  How they get their results is the purpose of leadership: by defining a vision of the future, by inspiring followers, and by taking action to get where they want to go.  Various leaders will use different styles of leadership and exhibit a variety or personal attributes like courage and integrity.  Every leader is unique.   Nevertheless, if they can bring their followers along with them on their journey to a better place, then they will have succeeded, and when they get there, people will say: “There is a great leader.”

Leonard Kloeber is an author and leadership consultant. He has extensive leadership experience as business executive and as a military officer. He has been a hands-on leader in a variety of organizations large and small. Most recently he was a human resources executive for a Fortune 100 company. His book – Victory Principles, Leadership Lessons from D-Day – illustrates seven bedrock leadership principles that all successful leaders use. Download a free summary of the Victory Principles at: http://www.victoryprinciples.com and find other bonus materials for leaders. Contact him at staffride@gmail.com

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Leonard_Kloeber/332142

 

Leadership

Not Everything is Leadership – Part 1 – Power Wielding Vs Referent Power

Imagine for a moment you are standing by the side of your house and doing some work on it. Your Neighbor Bob comes over to see how you are doing. As Bob approaches you say: “Hi Bob, can you do me a favor?” “Sure” Bob replies. “Can you hand me that hammer in the toolbox?” You ask. Bob reaches down and pulls out a small jeweler’s screwdriver, the kind jewelers use to repair a watch and hands it to you. “Bob,” you say, I asked you for a hammer. Bob replies, “This is a hammer!”

Welcome to the world of leadership studies where, by some counts, there are over 300 different definitions of leadership. Sound confusing? It is. Imagine a toolbox filled with 300 different tools all labeled “hammer”. How can this be? Because leadership may be one of the most powerful and consuming words in our dictionary and is used categorize every human interaction, deed, assertive thought or business function when in fact it may very well be something else. Why is that? Leadership scholar John Gardner said it best “Leadership is such a gripping subject that once it is given center stage it draws attention away from everything else.”

The simple fact remains that if we have no clarity about the nature or purpose of leadership, then how can we choose to use the capability leadership provides? How many times do we hear in the news that what this country needs, what this industry needs, what this company needs is strong leadership? But what does strong leadership really mean? Are we speaking about Power as authority; command and control; detailed management; strength of character; take charge persona or a collaborative movement for change? Moreover, which of these ideas are we willing to accept as the kind of solution to our most challenging issues?

If you were to choose power or authority, my advice is, be careful. There are different types of power and as the patriarch of leadership thought in America James MacGregor Burns writes in his 1978 intellectual blockbuster LEADERSHIP “power wielding is never leadership.” Power wielding is when someone acts primarily with self-interest in mind whether or not the purposes of the followers are realized writes Burns. We have witnessed this notion of power as a select few on Wall Street suffered the disdain of the populace having crossed the line between sensible risk taking to narcissistic self-interest, power wielders short and simple.

Yet power is an essential part of leadership. Power is a relationship, writes Burns, and perhaps its more relevant state is better described in the idea of an enhanced or shared referent power. Dorwin Cartwright and Alvin Zander describe referent power as when one person wishes to establish or maintain a satisfying self defining relationship where the reward to the person in these instances is not so much a matter of gaining social recognition or monetary rewards as of establishing his self-identity and confirming the notion of the sort of person he or she sees himself or herself to be. From this author’s perspective an enhanced or shared referent power is when each person in a transformational leadership relationship establish and maintain not only a self defining relationship but a relationship with each member where they themselves become transformed by their united actions.

One of the most notable shifts in the idea and concept of leadership in the 21st century is a significant movement towards leadership as an influence relationship where diverse groups of people exert a collaborative force to make significant change. Consider the words of Harvard Professor and former Medtronic CEO Bill George, “their approach to leadership is entirely different … They don’t care about position, power or status or organizational hierarchy, or even having followers. Instead, they are superb networkers who find collaborators to create opportunities and businesses. They are on line 24/7 always networking, always in touch.” For these emerging super-networkers leadership becomes an interlocking network of relationships where people work together to make significant change. For them–leadership is what people do together!

Dr. John Dentico works with organizations that want to develop leadership capacity at every level. He is the creator of the LeadSimm leadership development simulation method. He writes about leadership, strategic thinking and simulation learning. http://www.leadsimm.com. Your comments are appreciated at [http://www.leadsimm.com/blog].

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/John_Dentico/379790

 

Leadership

The Fundamental Purpose of Leadership

It’s time to question the traditional assumption of leadership’s fundamental purpose. The textbook account focuses on the leader’s role in maximizing employee performance. All the decades of writing about leadership style beginning over 50 years ago focuses on how different styles affect the motivation and productivity of employees. When we question the conventional purpose of leadership and offer a different foundation, we get a very different conception of leadership. Until we recognize the need for a radical shift in perspective, our vision of leadership will remain stuck in the past.

Having an internal focus on employee performance was acceptable for leadership prior to the 1970’s. But since the success of the Japanese commercial invasion, business has increasingly operated in an era of hyper-competition where rapid innovation changes whole markets overnight. In the old days of leadership theory, business was not so competitive. Then, business’s only task was to execute as cost effectively and profitably as possible. Today, there is also the need for businesses to be constantly re-inventing themselves, to be continuously creating new futures. For leaders to be successful now, they must have an external focus.

The new purpose of leaders is to ensure that new futures are created as rapidly as their external markets evolve. All organizations now have two equally important tasks: to deliver today’s results and to create the future. The principle of division of labor suggests that we need two separate functions for these very different tasks. Management needs to be upgraded from a narrowly controlling, mechanistic function to take care of today’s business, leaving leadership to champion changes to enhance competitive advantage.

So, what are the implications of this shift in emphasis? Well, if your sole reason for being is to maximize employee productivity, you need to be in charge of the people whose performance you want to improve. You need a formal position of authority over them. You need the authority to promote, move, develop, train and pay in accordance with merit. People can be motivated by informal leaders but none of the other productivity-enhancing decisions can be made without formal authority.

Not so with the new leadership. Promoting new products, services or better processes can be done by anyone, regardless of their formal roles. Even a consumer group criticizing an existing product line could show leadership from the outside to the organization. This new conception of leadership is the only way to make sense of bottom-up leadership. If leadership is merely the successful promotion of new products, then front-line employees can do it. The Sony employee who invented PlayStation is a good example. He showed bottom-up leadership to the senior executives at Sony whose initial reaction to the idea of PlayStation was to protest that Sony doesn’t do toys.

The role of senior executives is now more multifaceted. They need to both lead and manage. But leadership, as conceived here, has nothing to do with motivating employees to perform better, contrary to the textbook account. So-called transformational leadership became popular because it was felt that employees needed to be really inspired to give of their best. But now, we need to shift everything to do with motivating employees to management, leaving leadership free to promote enhancements to competitive advantage. Why? Because we need a definition of leadership that makes sense of how leadership can be shown bottom-up which has nothing to do with motivating employees to work harder. The sole purpose of leadership, therefore, is to promote new directions. It is management’s job to execute them.

Leaders must have an external focus to be effective; managers can focus internally. Both leadership and management are equally essential organizational functions, but only management is a formal role. Leadership is an informal, occasional act, like creativity, not a role. Senior executives are managers by virtue of their roles, not leaders. If their businesses are operating successfully and don’t need innovation or process improvements to succeed, then these organizations don’t need any leadership. This is a second radical implication of the new vision of leadership, the first one being that leadership has nothing to do with managing people or getting things done through them.

Keep in mind that, if leadership equates to the successful promotion of new products, services or process improvements, and if anyone can do it regardless of position, then employees with no one reporting to them can show leadership. This is a liberating conclusion, but one that has revolutionary implications for our understanding of leadership.

See http://www.leadersdirect.com for more information on this and related topics. Mitch McCrimmon’s latest book, Burn! 7 Leadership Myths in Ashes was published in 2006.

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Mitch_McCrimmon/79532