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December 8, 2006

Who's Your Daddy Now?

Safe to say, many colleagues of ours are professionals in the area of leadership studies, leadership coaching, and (within performance management) leadership execution.

After more than twenty years of exposure and osmosis, we should be able to face the big question, what do we know about leadership now? Is there some conclusive shortlist of findings that frame the path to success, or at least that warn off people unlikely to succeed?

The question is not trivial, because twenty years of research findings amount to the observation that leadership is a condition that results from a huge variety of possible combinations of circumstance, predispositions and group motivation. One might say, fairly, that regardles of the style and occasion of attempts at leadership, the essential truth is that leadership occurs. Most of our excitement about it is in trying to figure out how to make it recur -- in particular, on demand.

Consequently, studying leadership is like studying the weather. Slap together two or three Crays, and see what conditions can be patterned that suggest we could make rain where we want it by seeding clouds today. The brute force of data crunching is certainly less daunting now than twenty years ago, so although there is no evidence that scientific study of leadership has actually generated mo' betta leaders, there's plenty of evidence that more people know how to describe their deliberate pursuit and strategy for becoming a leader.

That's compelling and all, at least because while we still don't have standard edition well-worn copies of Leadership For Dummies (well, I should fact-check that!) being passed around, there seems to be some strategy for almost any personality. To wit, the advice industry for ersatz leadership and repentance -- and statistically, perhaps, better chance of more good leaders.

Or not.

It must be said that the staffers of the repentance wing, which increasingly consist mostly of expensive therapists and inexpensive jail wardens, appear to be well suited to their jobs with very little certified expertise in "leadership" per se. However, at least in the Western cultures, they both know quite a lot about authority, which is an excellently revealing indicator of the noise factor in leadership.

What would we say is the "signal" in leadership? Simple: it is respect. Isn't it obvious that respect breeds authority whereas authority only incidentally breeds respect? Avoiding the easy mistake of confusing deference and respect, the answer is "Yes". Authority figures are almost wholly dependent on the circumstances of their authority, and that authority may be entirely meaningless in another context. Whereas respect turns out to be quite portable, and is even a pretty effective form of social currency. How common it is, that an individual who has or who quickly earns respect can sprout as the leader in even a wholly unexpected and/or unprecedented circumstance. (Readers of other Archestra content might also recognize this as a distinction between competency and technique, where competency points squarely at the ability to rise to the occasion, while technique is just a method that might be chosen in the heat of the moment by the competency.)

So, rather than obsess about controlling circumstances so that authority can blossom and survive, our real issue is to understand the ways and means of earning respect.

This means that if we look at leadership as an outcome for which a measurable supporting effort may be evaluated as a performance, then we might also stress certain behaviors that earn respect as being the key performance indicators, and the appropriateness of those behaviors to their occasions as being the critical success factors. Yet in the end there will always be the noise of authority, noise that most likely stems from the distorting influence of politics. Recognizing politics as a competitor to the competency of "respect" is certainly an interesting perspective on the prospects for leadership, but the point of that observation is to ask that politics not be used as a substitute for coaching and measuring leadership. We need a better signal-to-noise ratio, and we won't get one by overemphasizing politics.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at December 8, 2006 4:44 AM

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