Читать книгу Forceful Leadership and Enabling Leadership: You Can Do Both - Роберт Каплан - Страница 7

Preface

In the following report I employ the terms forceful and enabling because they are quite commonly used in organizations to describe roughly the same managerial characteristics that I ascribe to them. The other reason is that it was important to me for conceptual reasons that both terms have positive connotations.

The word forceful, as unremarkable as it is, grew out of years of action-research that I have conducted with executives and my effort to characterize, for them and for me, their basic nature. It occurred to me as I was working with an individual a couple of years ago that he, like so many of his peers, was a “force to be reckoned with.” And how did he get himself into trouble? By being too much of a force. I began calling this category of manager forces, but the suggestion of the use of force, which an acquaintance kindly pointed out, was not what I wanted to describe the desirable form of this approach to leadership. Forceful was better because it did not carry that baggage.

I adopted enabling because I heard executives talking about the need to, for example, “enable people to innovate” or “enable the organization to perform at high levels.”

A few years ago I wrote about what I termed the expansive executive and distinguished between the desirable case and the extreme case (Kaplan, 1990, 1991; Kaplan, Drath, & Kofodimos, 1992). This forerunner of the idea of forceful leadership was much more fully developed at that stage than was the precursor to enabling leadership.

Once this opposition of forceful and enabling leadership crystallized in my mind, I developed with help from my colleagues a draft instrument for measuring it. This report is based on the quantitative data from our early use of this instrument as well as the qualitative data from our service work.

In treating the notion of forceful versus enabling, I do not for a moment regard it as constituting all of leadership. I do, however, think that understanding it is important if we are to improve the effectiveness of leadership as it is practiced today.