2006 was a difficult year: I’d read hundreds, if not thousands, of books and articles, and concluded that Socrates was right — wisdom only comes when you realize how ignorant you are.
These people lead from their positional control over large networks of subordinates and tend to drive any required change from the top. That “drive” also hints at both the mechanistic assumptions about how organization work and the coercion that is available to those in charge: a general can order executions, a judge can imprison people, and a CEO can discipline or sack employees, and so on.
Indeed, one could well argue that power is not so much a cause of subordinate action as a consequence of it: if subordinates do as leaders demand, then, only then, are leaders powerful. If this was not the case, then we could not explain a mutiny and the courage to face the consequences.
There may be thousands of individuals who are “potentially” great leaders, but if that potential is never realized, if no products of that leadership are forthcoming, then it would be logically difficult to speak of these people as “leaders,” except in the sense of “failed” or “theoretical” leaders — people who actually achieve little or nothing.
Indeed, most aspects of leadership use motivational strategies that can be regarded by some people — especially those subject to them — as coercive. Thus a religious charismatic might regard his or her actions as simply based on revealing the truth to their followers — who are then free to choose to follow or not as they wish. But if the followers believe that failure to adhere to religious principles will lead to eternal damnation and a slow roast in hell, then they might consider that as coercive.
One particularly well-supported case of this is that of Benjamin Franklin, whose early successes seem not to have been based on articulating a compelling vision or rousing the emotions of followers to transcend their personal interests in favor of the greater good. On the contrary, Franklin’s pragmatic leadership was rooted in finding practical solutions to outstanding problems that engaged the interests, rather than the emotions, of others.
The label “mundane” underestimates the skill and precision required to perform these intricate acts, for they are meticulously constructed. Indeed, to those of us unable to reproduce such acts, they appear more like the tacit skills of a magician — ostensibly simple but impossible to explain. Thus it is the assiduous leaders who, for example, consistently ask about the health of their followers’ families, or who always make a point on ensuring their followers are in agreement with the direction of the organization and their work rate, who build the networks that make the organization work.
It is, therefore, not how many leadership competences you can tick off on your CV that makes you a successful leader, for these are inevitably decontextualized. What, for instance, is the point of having a high level of competence in public speaking when your leadership is required in a place where no public speaking role is required? Competences, then, are often essentially related to an individual — yet leadership is necessarily a relational phenomenon: without followers, you cannot be a leader, no matter how many “individual” competences you might have. Instead, we might consider the importance of leadership “practices” — not what leaders “have,” but what they “do.”
Another way to put this is that the division is rooted partly in the context: management is the equivalent of deja vu (seen this before), whereas leadership is the equivalent of vu jade (never seen this before). If this is valid, when acting as a manager, you are required to engage the requisite process — the standard operating procedure — to resolve the previously experienced problem the last time it emerged. In contrast, when you are acting as a leader, you are required to facilitate the construction of an innovative response to the novel or recalcitrant problem.
Management and leadership, as two form of authority rooted in the distinction between certainty and uncertainty, can also be related to typology of “tame” and “wicked” problems.
Tame problems are akin to puzzles — for which there is always an answer.
A wicked problem is complex, rather than just complicated — that is, it cannot be removed from its environment, solved, and returned without affecting the environment.
In sum, we cannot provide everything for everybody; at some point, we need to make a political decision about who gets what and based on which criteria. This inherently contested arena is typical of a wicked problem. Fixing a broken leg is the equivalent of a tame problem. Obesity, drug abuse, violence are not simply problems of health, they are often deeply complex social problems that sit across and between different government departments and institutions.
Again, this is typical of what happens when we try to solve wicked problems — other problems emerge to compound the original problem.
The uncertainty involved in wicked problems implies that leadership, as I am defining it, is not a science but an art — the art of engaging a community in facing up to complex collective problems.
A critical problem, that is, a crisis, is present as self-evident in nature, as encapsulating very little time for decision-making and action, and it is often associated with authoritarianism. Here there is virtually no uncertainty about what needs to be done, at least in the behavior of the commander, whose role is to take the required decisive action — that is, to provide the answer to the problem, not to engage SOPs (management) if these delay the decision, or ask questions and seek collaborative assistance (leadership).
Translated into critical problems, I suggest that for such crises we do need decision-makers who are god-like in their decisiveness and their ability to provide the answer to the crisis. And since we reward people who are good in crises (and ignore people who are such good managers that there are very few crises), commanders soon learn to seek out (or reframe situations as) crises.
It is often the case that the same individual group with authority will switch between the command, management, and leadership roles as they perceive — and constitute — the problem as critical, tame, or wicked, or even as a single problem that itself shifts across these boundaries.
Indeed, wicked problems don’t offer themselves up to be solved by such elegant approaches precisely because these problems lie outside and across several different cultures and institutions. But because we are prisoners of our own cultural preferences, we become addicted to them and have great difficulty stepping outside our world to see something differently. As Proust put it: “the real voyage of discover consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”