Читать книгу Wounded Leaders: How Their Damaged Past Affects Your Future - Allan Bonner - Страница 8

How do we define the terms “leader” and “leadership? A dictionary tells us the former is “a person or thing that leads...a person who is well fitted to lead”, while leadership is defined as “the state or position of being a leader...the qualities of a leader...the ability to lead”.

That seems straightforward at first glance but let’s look deeper at a business organization. It also uses the term “management”, defined by the dictionary as “control, handling, direction”. Yet a leader may also control, handle, and direct and a manager may be in a state or position of leading.

If we make a broad generalization, we can perhaps say that leaders are at the top of organizations and managers are one step lower in rank. The term “managing director” is used more in Britain than North America, but I know of at least one Canadian company in which the President reported to the Managing Director. The terminology begins to obscure simple distinctions such as giving and taking orders-or position on the organizational chart.

If leaders are above managers, then it might also be true that managers are more often in the trenches, dealing with issues, people, assets, and systems, while leaders concern themselves with more motivational and conceptual matters. This might be consistent with some schools of thought which hold that management is the implementation of known systems, whereas leadership involves breaking new ground. Standards can address known systems, but breaking new ground is an adaptive challenge needing new approaches. Once those new approaches are mastered, they become standards to be implemented with management and supervision. So, even a good working definition changes over time, with the people involved and with the task at hand.

I still find these distinctions unsatisfying because we know that a leader may regularly perform management functions and vice versa. So let’s broaden our search to look at leadership in history and in non-business settings.

As noted earlier it is not uncommon to hear the names of Winston Churchill, General George S. Patton or Charles de Gaulle in general discussions of leadership. These are just three well-known leaders from three different cultures, and others may come to mind, depending on context. Perhaps, ironically, it is also hard to imagine a detailed and analytical discussion about the leadership styles of these icons while they were in their prime. Perhaps it is the benefit of hindsight, but these leaders seemed to make decisions and act on them; their actions did not need validation by the word “leadership”. Their leadership was self-evident. Yet today, corporate executives discuss their leadership styles at length and the business literature examines how various senior executives fit into leadership categories.

Given the violent history of the world, it is no surprise that the imagery associated with leadership often concerns the military. Both de Gaulle and Patton were generals and Churchill began his career in the cavalry. Even today military terminology such “lock and load”, “take no prisoners”, “in the trenches”, “troops” and so on is heard regularly in the workplace.

It seems natural, then, to draw parallels between business management techniques and command and control practised by the military. The concept was borrowed from the military around the turn of the twentieth century and is still in vogue in many organizations. The irony is that my work with approximately 2,000 senior military officers as well as studies of the military literature show that this top-down decision-making concept has never been as universally useful as the doctrine implies.