Читать книгу Agile 2 - Adrian Lander - Страница 35

Leadership is influence: a person is a leader if they have influence over others. This includes influence of any kind.

You might have influence over a friend, but you don't have actual authority over them. Your influence might lie in their respect for your ideas or your enthusiasm, which is catching. Whatever the source, that kind of influence does not come from having explicit authority.

Thought leaders usually have no direct authority over others. People read Deepak Chopra's books because they respect what he says. In that way, he influences them; he leads them. His readers have agency. They do not follow Chopra on command, but they do follow him—willingly—because they believe that he has insight. People often follow others because they feel those others have insight. One can follow someone even without fully understanding the other, if one trusts the insight and judgment of the other.

What about the Path-Goal leadership model? In those terms, we might say that Chopra's leadership style is both achievement oriented and supportive. It is achievement oriented, because he describes ideas for people to embrace, thereby challenging them; and his style is also supportive, because his advice pertains to their well-being, rather than to achieving Chopra's own objectives.

Chopra is a thought leader. On a team, there are often people who develop influence through thought leadership. They might have a great deal of experience or they might have deep knowledge about a topic or they might have shown that they are very smart or think things through well.

Others on a team might develop influence through their force of personality: they are persuasive, or they project an air of authority. They look, sound, or act “like a leader.”

It is also not uncommon for cliques to emerge among groups of people, including work teams. A clique can be a source of power: if one attains influence within a clique, the clique can exert collective influence over the entire group, through the force of its numbers. If the clique has a leader—which is often the case—then that leader, in effect, can control the entire group, becoming, in effect, a directive leader.

This clique control pattern is described by Leader Member Exchange (LMX) theory,¹⁵ which is primarily a descriptive theory rather than an explanation of why people behave that way. LMX theory observes that “in-groups” or cliques naturally form, and therefore intentional intervention is needed to prevent them or dismantle them. Doing so requires either authority or explicit preventions such as group voting, but even with such preventions, people still develop influence; thus, we are back to the power of informal influence and its ability to circumvent any procedural safeguard.

It is important to note that any type of influence is a kind of authority; it is a degree of authority that others give to someone over themselves. They follow the influencer willingly, but they still follow. This is informal authority, and just as formal (explicitly given) authority can be taken away by whoever granted it, informal authority can be taken away by those who follow.

A leader can delegate to others; they thereby lend their authority to those others—whether the authority is formal or informal. A democratic vote is a mechanism by which a group delegates their collective authority to a single member, nominating the person as their leader. That leader then might operate in a directive, achievement-oriented, participative, or supportive manner.

Authority can also be constrained. For example, one might have authority over whether a team can release a product to the users, but one might not have any other kind of authority. As another example, one might have authority over product feature decisions within a team, but no other kind of authority.