A New Sciences Outline for Leadership Development, by Matthew R. Fairholm - The Newtonian physics that formed the foundation of physical and social science for centuries is unwinding in the face of the new sciences. The principles of the new sciences shed needed light on the technologies of leadership in modern organizations. This paper links specific leadership technologies to four general principles taken from the new sciences. Together, these technologies and principles provide a new metaphor for organizational life and the work of leadership. This metaphor offers an alternative explanation of the leadership phenomenon generally, helps organizational actors ground their leadership activity in terms of the new sciences theory, and points to better ways to prepare ourselves for the demands of leadership in organizations. This, in turn, provides a way for leaders to better understand their organizational environment and links that understanding to an outline of skills, behaviors, and attitudes that can be used in practical leadership development programs.
Date Added: 2006-03-27 | Accessed: 502 times
Defining Leadership: A Review of Past, Present, and Future Ideas, by Matthew R. Fairholm - Defining leadership is a recent academic activity, though the phenomenon of leadership has been ever present in human relations. Stogdill reminds us that the word “leader” has origins back to the 1300s and the word “leadership” dates back to the 1800s. He reviewed over 3,000 studies directly related to leadership and suggested that there are almost as "many different definitions of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to define the concept." Bennis and Nanus found 350 definitions from thousands of studies. Rost found 221 definitions in 587 books and articles written from 1900 to 1990.
These reviews of leadership studies and definitions have certainly not closed the book on leadership research. In fact, many researchers lament the progress (or lack of progress) made in understanding and defining leadership. Bennis and Nanus conclude that “[n]ever have so many labored so long to say so little.” Rost is even more indicting when he comments that “these attempts to define leadership have been confusing, varied, disorganized, idiosyncratic, muddled, and, according to conventional wisdom, quite unrewarding.” Yet these researchers, and many others, continue their work studying, defining, identifying, and developing leadership. Some are satisfied with the well known definitional concept of “I know it when I see it.”
This summary first provides a review of four historical threads of leadership thought and discusses the debate about the relationships between management and leadership. It then turns to a discussion of broader philosophical trends of leadership theory, such as values based transformational leadership, leader/follower interactions and followership, and sense-making conceptions of leadership. Fairholm’s model of leadership virtual realities is then reviewed. In sum, what follows describes how past approaches that focused on leaders evolved into broader definitions of leadership and now point to more comprehensive understandings of leadership in terms of ever-more encompassing individual conceptions of leadership. Finally, the literature review concludes with a brief overall summary.
Date Added: 2006-03-24 | Accessed: 669 times
Different Perspectives on the Practice of Leadership, by Matthew R. Fairholm - Public administrators need not only practical and intellectual permission to exercise leadership, but also a practical and intellectual understanding of what leadership actually is. Much has emerged in the public administration literature and practice about the need for and legitimacy of public managers exerting leadership in their work, complementing the traditional functions of organizational management and policy implementation. Calling on the experiences and ideas of practitioners, this article offers an empirical understanding – both descriptive and prescriptive – of what leadership actually looks like as it is practiced by public managers. It uncovers five leadership perspectives (ranging from leadership as equivalent to scientific management, to leadership being a whole-soul or spiritual endeavor) held by public managers and discusses their implications for public administration. It legitimizes the notion that leadership is a crucial part of public administration and offers public managers the chance to improve or enhance those legitimate leadership activities.
Date Added: 2006-03-27 | Accessed: 682 times
Four V’s of Leadership, by Matt Fairholm - Former Academic Director of Washington, DC’s Certified Public Manager Program, Leadership Professor Matt Fairholm discusses leadership and management within a conceptual framework he calls the Four V’s of Leadership: Values, Vision, Vector, and Voice. Fairholm shows how Values trigger behavior and reflect meaning, purpose, and commitment; Vision operationalizes values; Vectors operationalize vision and add direction; and Voice cements the leadership relationship.
In today’s organizations it makes sense to focus on what is meant by leadership and management. “Leader" is a title an individual may have. It may connote someone who practices leadership or it may merely connote the head person of a group, regardless of the functions and role he or she performs. Thus, leader and leadership do not necessarily reflect the same thing. Leader is a title, while leadership is an action, a phenomenon, a relationship, that is not necessarily related to position.
Manager is perhaps more straightforward. A manager holds a position of authority and because of that hierarchical status can do some things in an organization that others cannot. Doing the stuff of management is the qualifier for who may be a manager, but merely being a manager, however, is not ipso facto leadership. Regardless of the perspective of leadership and management one holds, using the concepts of the Four Vs discussed in this paper provides a useful framework to understand and apply both tools to modern organizations.
Date Added: 2006-03-25 | Accessed: 555 times
How Individual Power Use Affects Team Process And Performance - Even within teams of peers, certain individuals have more power than others. Individual members may have essential skills and experience, networks outside the team, or status within the organization that give them more power than the average team member (French & Raven, 1959; Hollander, 1958). How these powerholders use their power may vary from team to team. For example, consider a task force whose purpose is to solve a problem in the organization’s ability to attract new members. One member of the team is especially expert in member-engagement practices and root cause analysis, upon which the team is dependent to complete its task well. This dependency gives her power (Emerson, 1964). She might use her power solely to influence the team’s task approach in the areas most relevant to her particular skill. Or she may use her special influence to dominate a range of team functions, from managing relations with senior leaders, to controlling the conflict-management processes within the group. Or she might exert no special influence at all, acting as an average team member in all domains. What consequences might her choices have for the effectiveness of this team?
Date Added: 2006-06-02 | Accessed: 452 times
Knowledge Nomads: Understanding An Overlooked Segment Of The Workforce Helps Managers Lead - Managers have formal and official supervisory authority within an organizational hierarchy. As a result, a perennial concern of managers is employee mobility, i.e., the turnover of workers, and the implication of worker mobility for the staffing of critical functions in the organization.
Managers in organizations can also be leaders. According to Burns, in his seminal volume Leadership (1978, 18): “Leadership over human beings is exercised when persons with certain motives and purposes mobilize… resources so as to arouse, engage, and satisfy the motives of followers... in order to realize goals mutually held by leaders and followers.” Consistent with this definition of leadership, a core challenge confronting a manager who seeks to lead is to figure out the motives of followers and encourage their commitment to blossom.
In our work, we have observed that managers often have a common mindset about turnover and commitment that limits their ability to lead and, in particular, limits their ability to elicit commitment. Many managers approach commitment in a skewed, simplistic way. As a result, they fail to unleash the commitment of their employees, especially the commitment of a young, growing, mobile, and significant segment of their workforce we call Knowledge Nomads. Indeed, knowing the importance of worker commitment, and knowing how to secure it, are two separate matters. This difference is one of the keys to leading organizations, above and beyond managing.
Date Added: 2006-06-02 | Accessed: 656 times
Leadership Amid the Constraints of Trust, by Matthew Fairholm and Gil Fairholm - For public managers to lead successfully, they require and must ensure that they create a work environment that provides for mutual trust between themselves and their co-workers. While seemingly obvious, it is neither obvious nor is it necessarily a simple objective to achieve, as this article highlights. The leader’s role is a two-fold cultural and teaching enterprise: institutionalizing cultural principles in their organizations and then teaching followers to internalize these cultural principles in their actions. The specific features of an organization’s culture condition what leaders do and how they do it. However, leaders also condition the culture by their actions and beliefs. Seen this way, a leader’s primary activity is to create a culture supportive of desired values. As followers internalize these cultural values, they develop a devotion to the institution that cannot come in any other way. This both requires trust and encourages trust. The task is not simple; it is fraught with difficulty, pitfalls, and barriers. This article explains some constraints that hinder the development of a culture based on trust specifically and the enterprise of leadership in general.
Date Added: 2006-03-26 | Accessed: 336 times
Sidebars, Squirms, and Subtle Distracters: Leadership Interactions in a Volunteer Steering Committee, by Matthew R. Fairholm - This studies leadership within a volunteer organization magnifying the relational elements between those who lead and those who follow, in order to give us greater insight into the phenomenon of leadership. Leadership is a relationship between volunteers. In brief, both the leader and follower choose to be in their unique relationship. If the element of choice is missing, then we use other words to describe what is going on; at best management and at worst coercion.
Many have studied leadership as a collection of qualities, a system of techniques or behaviors, and as a methodology or system of contingencies. Early attempts to codify leadership and determine what "makes a good leader" centered on the belief that leaders are born, not made, giving rise to various forms of trait theory: the idea that leadership depends upon personal qualities, personality, and character. Because of the difficulty in finding a definitive list of qualities that all leaders hold in common, theorists shifted to studying behavior instead of inborn traits. Such behavior-based theories provided a way for people to copy what other leaders had done, but the behaviors did not prove to be necessarily generalized.
For the purposes of this study, the process of leadership is generally defined as the interactions among group members that elicit decisions and actions to be implemented for or by the general membership of the organization or a subsection of it. Understanding the elements of this process gives us a richer understanding of leadership that should point the way to better theorizing about leadership and more practical application in group settings.
Date Added: 2006-03-25 | Accessed: 507 times
Themes and Theory of Leadership: James MacGregor Burns and the Philosophy of Leadership, by Matt Fairholm - A professor of management once told a friend, that if he comes upon an article on leadership and notices the bibliography does not include Leadership by James MacGregor Burns (1978), he dismisses it as unthoughtful and incomplete. That is quite a litmus test. Nevertheless, many share the view that anyone who claims to have thought seriously about the concept of leadership, must wrestle with the ideas in Burns' book. It is a seminal work; perhaps it is the one book that ensconced in academia the legitimate field of leadership theory and practice.
The intention of this work is to review the major themes of Burns’ book, discuss the two concepts that are most often debated and studied (i.e. transactional and transforming leadership), and suggest that these two concepts are important mainly as they help to elucidate the real focus of the book -- a general theory of leadership that is inherently based on interpersonal relationships, motives, and values. Doing this will help explain why some who focus on the checklists and measurements of organizational effectiveness often confuse the distinctions between the concepts and functions of leadership and management.
Date Added: 2006-03-23 | Accessed: 597 times