Leadership ( Deakin university week 1)

Identifying leadership role models

We all have different ideas about who is and isn’t a leader. Whether you agree or disagree with what other people think, this isn’t as important as what your choice of role models reveals about you.

Leadership is a complicated concept. Indeed, whether someone is considered to be a leader or not is highly contentious. While we often hear the words ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ used, there’s still a lot of debate about what these words actually mean. Even if we agree on who is a leader, the reasons we give to explain why are often very different.

For example, if we consider the most recent US presidential election, while Donald Trump received the most Electoral College votes, there was, and still is, a vocal contingent that rejects him as a legitimate leader. If you were to speak to an anti-Monarchist in Britain or Australia, they may say the Queen isn’t a true leader. If you aren’t following global politics, when asked about Tsai Ing-wen, the President of Taiwan, your answer may be ‘who?’

There are three chief conclusions to be drawn from this:

1. We have different views on who we regard as a leader and who we don’t.
2. Even when we agree on who we think is a leader, we express different reasons for explaining why.
3. There is no-one who is universally accepted as a model leader.

Take a moment to reflect on who you selected as effective leaders in Step 1.4.

• Have you met them in person?
• Have you seen them ‘do’ the work that characterises them as leaders?

These questions are important to consider as they show that we can view people as leaders without having met them. This is a good thing since it would be challenging if not impossible to have face-to-face opportunities with everyone we consider to be a leader, particularly as you (and they) move on to more senior positions.

It may also show that you can consider people to be leaders without having concrete primary evidence of them enacting leadership. This can be both a blessing and a curse; and is a critical issue we will be addressing in subsequent courses.

Revisiting your definition of leadership

Developing a definition of leadership that makes sense to you is more important than academic definitions.

There are many ways to define leadership. Being clear about your definition helps you to understand whether you or your organisation has a leadership problem or an issue of a completely different nature.

While we’ll explore this concept in more detail next week, for now there are some key ideas to consider, including:

• while there are many ways of defining leadership, your personal definition will have the greatest impact on your own actions.
• understanding other peoples’ definitions can help you understand how and why people see leadership differently.
• over time you should be open to evolving your own definition of leadership.

Modern leadership thinking

While concepts of leadership has evolved over time, understanding contemporary approaches to leadership will help inform your exploration of leadership throughout the rest of this course.

In the words of George Santayana, ‘those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it’, which is why it’s important to be aware of and understand different theories and approaches to leadership.

Leadership thinking from the 20th century onwards has changed significantly. Understanding what these changes are will help you reflect on whether your concept of leadership is contemporary or stuck in the past.

It should further be noted that despite the emergence of female leaders in the public consciousness during the 19th and early 20th century, most leadership writing has been both very masculine and dominated by Western researchers.

A timeline of leadership thought

1900–1930	From 1900–1930 leadership focused on the running of organisations, particularly large heavy industrial enterprises with a focus on command, control, and centralisation, characterised by ‘the ability to impress the will of the leader on those led and induce obedience, respect, loyalty, and cooperation’ (Steward 1905).
1930s	During the 1930s, traits became the main focus of leadership definitions and the view that leadership was a matter of influence, as opposed to domination emerged. The interaction of leaders and the led was also explored.
1940s	This led to a shift in the 1940s to define leaders in terms of group activities; directing groups with persuasion becoming a big issue in definitions of leadership.
1950s	Indeed, this idea progressed into the 1950s where the common view was that leadership is what leaders do in groups.
1960s	Social changes in the 1960s, particularly the civil rights movement, solidified this idea, but looked more closely at the behaviours people could enact to influence others towards shared goals.
1970s	Given these social changes, the impact of context and situation on leadership came to the fore in the 1970s.
1980s	By the 1980s, the growth of corporations worldwide lead to an explosion of scholarly work that created huge divergence in the literature. Competing themes included: Do as the leaders wishes, influence, traits, and transformation.
1990s	These themes continued into the 1990s, but took on more socially responsible tones, with a focus on issues such as leadership diversity and ethical conduct.
2000 onwards	This took on even more importance after 9/11 and other corporate scandals in the 2000s such as Enron and Worldcom. Ethics became central to any discussion of leadership and all accredited business schools were compelled to include ethics when teaching leadership.

Key theories

The following theories emerged in the last century to help us better understand leadership and provide a range of lenses to examine the study and practice of leadership.

• Great Man theories: mid-19th century
• Trait theories: 1930–1940s
• Behavioural theories: 1940s–1950s
• Contingency theories: 1960s onwards
• Transactional/transformational leadership: 1970s onwards
• Implicit leadership theories: 1970s onwards
• Charismatic leadership: 1980s
• Contemporary theories: eg authentic leadership, servant leadership, spiritual leadership, dispersed leadership

Revisiting key leadership principles

This week we’ve looked at some of the basic principles that underpin the question, ‘what is leadership?’.

Here Andrea sums up the basic principles of leadership in preparation for Week 2, ‘Leadership in practice’.

Your leader role models and what they say about you

Leader role models help us understand more about ourselves or the person following their chosen leader because, ultimately, there will never be universal agreement about whether someone is a ‘real’ leader or not.

Even if we agree on who is a leader, we often have different reasons for why we think this. As such, talking about who is a leader tells us more about the individual rather than the leader themselves. This is why I take the position that leadership is a process. It’s also a practice; a thing we do.

Definitions of leadership

While there are many competing definitions about what leadership is really about, they all converge around four key elements: leader, followers, influence and goal. For this reason, leadership may be defined as ‘the process of influencing a group of individuals towards a goal’.

Theories of leadership

This week also introduced you to various leadership theories and approaches that we’ll discuss further next week. While leadership theories are longstanding, their study within organisations has largely been a 20th century phenomenon.

Great Man theories led to trait leadership and then leader behaviours and styles. This was followed by contingency leadership, transactional/transformational leadership and then implicit leadership theories.

More contemporary approaches have a greater focus on ethics and social responsibility as seen in authentic leadership, servant leadership, spiritual leadership and dispersed leadership. As such, we start to see that the way we view leadership has shifted significantly over time.