Leadership

PSYCH 485 blog

Leadership Making Makes All the Difference

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The concept of leadership making resonates with me because of the followership experiences throughout my career. I believe that leadership is made, and that an effective leader-follower relationship can exist between any two willing people. Effective does not necessarily mean special, memorable, or electrifying—there will always be a range of connection qualities between people, creating a spectrum of synergy ranging from basic, competent, and reliable, all the way to transformational. But effective does set the baseline expectations between the leader and the follower: that time and repeated opportunity to connect will lead to increasingly better performance in a leader-follower relationship.

 

The situations where my leader did not invest in the making of their leadership relationship with me and other followers often ended badly. I’m a Xennial, born in a year that straddles the Generation X and Millennial Generation, and our attitude toward work has redefined the concept of work-life balance—quite simply, the majority of my life is outside of work (Rass, 2020). As I have in the past, I am still willing to invest myself in deeper involvement with my job, especially where there are opportunities for unique experiences, expertise development, or preparation to do next-steps for career moves and advancement. However, the assumption that I will play some games with my time and commitments in order to entice a leader’s affection is just not for me. It is purely unrealistic to expect me to arrive to a situation and give all of my time personal resources in order to solicit the attention of a leader. That is, it’s unrealistic without an equal initial investment from the leader and the organization. And yet, despite the proclivities of my generation, the times in my career when a leader and an organization invested in me, and we’ve created a synergy into which I want to invest myself in turn have been the most memorable, developmental, and impactful of my career.

The phases in leadership making table in Northouse (2018; Table 7.1) presents a succinct summary of these synergistic experiences—and a lens by which to view the failed connections. When a leader has invested in the time and the “making” with me, we’ve come together and made great things happen. And those great things required time away from my spouse and children, lost sleep, tested patience, tedious research, energized debate, and many other discomforts along the way. When a leader has assumed that I will be investing myself into their pet projects at levels beyond my job duties without much investment in me in the beginning, the situation has usually devolved into frustration and me choosing to depart for another opportunity. There are always more opportunities, and there are plenty of leaders out there who are naturally drawn to making their leadership, instead of taking it.

 

Northouse, P. G. (2018). Leadership: Theory and Practice (8th ed.). SAGE Publications, Inc.

Rass, A. (2020, February 6). Work-life balance: Views evolving with new generations. SFM Mutual Insurance. https://www.sfmic.com/work-life-balance-views-evolving-with-new-generations/

Differing Effects of Power in a Venturing Crew

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The most vivid examples I’ve witnessed of power employed in a leadership situation come from my experience as an advisor in the Venturing program, the co-ed adventure-oriented Scouting program for young adults age 14-20. The Venturing program relies on a youth-member-led leadership structure where adult advisors are expected to advise, speaking or contributing usually only when asked, and ultimately avoiding managing and directing the happenings of a Venturing crew (a local group of Venturers) except for matters of health and safety. The crew president is the top youth leader of a crew who is elected to their leadership role by their peers. The crew advisor is the adult with primary responsibility for the crew’s activities, events, and operations, and is appointed into their role by a crew committee comprised of parents and adult-aged community members who support the crew. The two roles of the crew president and crew advisor can create an ongoing demonstration of power in leadership for the crew.

The logo of the Venturing program of the Boy Scouts of America

The crew president needs to utilize the full spectrum of power to help their crew be functional and fun for its members. An elected youth leader is continuously balancing their personal social relationships against the responsibilities they have to their leadership role, the aims and methods of the Venturing program, and to the collective needs and interests of the members of the crew. Crew presidents often have expert power because they have some level of seniority due to some amount of experience with the crew that the voting members value. From their experience as a Venturer they often develop referent power within the crew, as the people who voted for the crew president have usually had some degree of shared experience with one another. However, the crew president also needs to keep things going as far as the crew program is concerned, and for that they would rely on legitimate and coercive power. One of the limits of democracy is that decisions can be lost in deliberation, so the crew president needs to decide when it is time to end the debate and make a final decision. A crew president may need to apply some pressure to the members in order to get them to follow-through with their responsibilities to the crew, or to act in some manner that will help a decision be made. The crew president can even leverage reward power with some members through their ability to make decisions about resources or activities in a group setting where there are often multiple competing priorities or options. An effective crew president often aims to broker situations of mutual benefit where everyone gets something that they want—whether now or later.

The crew advisor, with their limited role in directly deciding how the crew operates, often must leverage power differently than the crew president. Advisors often develop expert and referent power with the members due to their shared experiences on crew activities. The advisor’s advanced experience creates opportunities to share knowledge that supports the crew’s Venturers in doing something that they want to do. While the advisor does possess legitimate power in the crew given the expectation for supporting health and safety, it is best to wield that form of power sparingly in order to allow the Venturers to have the greatest opportunity to learn and develop new skills while members of Venturing. And reward and coercive power can be damaging to the advisor-Venturer relationship if the advisor employs those too often. The core philosophy of Venturing seeks to place young people into positions of leadership and autonomous decision-making, and the advisor can be seen as manipulative if they attempt to directly control the decisions and actions of the Venturers.

 

Hughes, Richard, et al. Power and Influence. Leadership: Enhancing the Lessons of Experience. Homewood, IL. Irwin. 1993. 0256102783. Ch. 5. pp. 107-131.

Unlikely Leaders and Their Unlikely Development

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The Northouse (2018) chapter about the “Skills Approach” of leadership begins to summarize the model of exploring leadership practice through skills that can be developed in a person. When explaining how the skills approach works, the section leads with the following:

“The skills approach is primarily descriptive: It describes leadership from a skills perspective. Rather than providing prescriptions for success in leadership, the skills approach provides a structure for understanding the nature of effective leadership.”

And the section ends with:

“The skills approach works by providing a map for how to reach effective leadership in an organization: Leaders need to have problem-solving skill, social judgment skills, and knowledge. Workers can improve their capabilities in these areas through training and experience. Although each leader’s personal attributes affect his or her skills, it is the leader’s skills themselves that are most important in addressing organizational problems.”

And to all of this I say, “Yes, that is obvious. What are we questioning again?”

We regularly see unlikely leaders (Hunter, 2021) develop into success stories. We hear about unexpected persons who “rise to the occasion” (McCallum, 2020). And the impacts of unlikely leaders, like Stacey Abrams, can be felt the world over (Williams, 2019). Unlikely leaders are developing into their role of influencers—as guides for their followers—through the real-world tests they accept and face head-on. The development of unlikely leaders can be trial by fire—learning in the midst of leading—or it could be the product of a methodical and carefully-considered life path of personal development. But when it comes to the skills approach of leadership, one thing is certain about unlikely leaders becoming leaders is that process of “becoming”. They weren’t leaders before, and after developing their skills, they were seen as leaders afterward.

We cannot lose sight of the fact that unlikely leaders developed their leadership abilities in a manner that was customized and specific to them. They earned the ability to lead from their core group or key allies, and they learned as a result of their own experience, through a series of exercises to understand what is effective and what is not. And while there may have been plenty of bystanding people offering tips and advice to these leaders about how to lead or respond in a leader-like manner, I imagine that these unlikely leaders are those who spend much time ruminating, replaying, and imagining what went wrong and how they could improve next time. Although they didn’t develop leadership skills from leadership skill-building training courses, their authentic leadership experiences helped them develop a map for how to organize and understand leadership information they take-in.

 

Hunter, C. (2021, February 5). Unlikely Leaders. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unlikely-leaders-colin-hunter/

McCallum, T. (2020, March 24). Crisis Leaders Rise to the Occasion. Medium. https://tommccallum.medium.com/crisis-leaders-rise-to-the-occasion-c9c16a0ca02

Northouse, P. G. (2018). Leadership: Theory and Practice (8th ed.). SAGE Publications, Inc.

Williams, V. (2019, February 3). Stacey Abrams lost the Georgia governor’s race. But her star is rising. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/stacey-abrams-lost-the-georgia-governors-raise-but-her-star-is-rising/2019/02/02/1c3f4b74-2737-11e9-ad53-824486280311_story.html

Acknowledging followership is essential in a leadership development organization

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I’ve been involved with youth leadership development as a volunteer in the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) programs for nearly 35 years. I was a Scout in my youth for 11 years, earning the Eagle Scout Award, and holding many different roles as a leader of my peers, of events, and even of leadership training courses. As an adult volunteer (age 18 onward) I have been involved in leadership training for Scouts and for adult leaders, and even in leadership development event design and implementation. My leadership has been tested and forced to grow even recently, with a complex international volunteer leadership role from 2017 to 2020, where I formed and led a team of 30 who supported my responsibilities directly, and we as a team supported more than 5,000 international staff volunteers.

With all of that leadership experience in an organization designed to teach leadership, the chapter on “followership” that I read this past week in Northouse’s (2018) book titled Leadership was my first exposure to a formal discussion on following as an integral component of leadership. That seems like an oversight—the BSA aims to develop leadership and character in all of its members, and yet there has been little training or discussion to prepare leaders to understand the value, necessity, and growth of the followership. For example, the word “follower” does not appear once in the Introduction to Leadership Skills for Troops (ILST) syllabus (Boy Scouts of America, 2018). ILST is the first leadership training experience provided to Scouts in the BSA programs, and there is no mention of the followers on the other side of the leadership equation. 

Screen capture of the cover page of the Boy Scouts of America's training curriculum titled "Introduction to Leadership Skills for Troops.

Northouse’s (2018) definition of followership fits well with the Scouting program: Followership is a process whereby an individual or individuals accept the influence of others to accomplish a common goal. In essence, followership is not just a component of the methods of the Scout program, it actually represents the vast majority of the actual Scout program that is experienced by the Scouts. In the Scouting program it is regularly reinforced that not everybody can be the leader, but group cohesion makes possible many achievements that are far greater than an individual can deliver. The organization is hinting at followership, but failing to name it directly. By not naming it directly, the BSA consequently misses the opportunity to help developing leaders understand the value of followership.

Followership may be much of the Scouting experience, but Scouting alumni are not showing signs of appreciating the follower experiences that they received as a part of their leadership training. I know this anecdotally—from my own experience as a Scout and from the experiences of the young people I’ve worked with—but we can use some Internet searches to see what Scouting alumni are reflecting from their Scouting experience. Although unscientific, just scan the Figures 1-4 below, and see that when alumni think and talk about their Scouting experience. Scouting alumni seem to fondly recall the successes and failures they experienced during the times when they were leading others, and nobody is talking about anything they learned from their experiences as a follower who was being led by their peers.

Screen capture of Google search results showing a search for the phrase "Scouting taught me to be a leader" yields 8 hits.

Figure 1. A Google search for the phrase “Scouting taught me to be a leader” yields 8 results.

Screen capture of Google search results showing that a search for the phrase "Scouting taught me to be a follower" yields zero hits.

Figure 2. A search for the phrase “Scouting taught me to be a follower” yields zero hits.

 

Screen capture of Google search results showing that a search for the phrase "Scouting taught me leadership" yields 7,510 hits.

Figure 3. A search for the phrase “Scouting taught me leadership” yields 7,510 hits.

 

Screen capture of Google search results showing that a search for the phrase "Scouting taught me followership" yields zero hits.

Figure 4. A search for the phrase “Scouting taught me followership” yields zero hits.

Ultimately, the new paradigm of leadership study will move from the avant garde to the mainstream. I predict that within a decade the word “followership” will be much less obscure in leadership discussions. However, the real test on leadership development will be whether the BSA, a tradition-bound organization filled with many tradition-adhering volunteers, will begin to integrate the perspectives of followers into their training for leaders. Should they endeavor to prepare their Scouts and volunteers to understand the value of followers, we will see the leadership of Scouting alumni mature to new levels of effectiveness for the organizations and communities they will serve.

References

Boy Scouts of America. (2018). Introduction to leadership skills for troops: Facilitator guide. Boy Scouts of America. https://www.scouting.org/training/youth/

Northouse, P. G. (2018). Leadership: Theory and Practice (8th ed.). SAGE Publications, Inc.

The leadership traits they wanted and the chaos it wrought

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One of the most unstable employment experiences of my career happened because the “leader” of my former department was appointed based on some of his traits that were favorable to the organization and its administration. My department’s leader during the time I was there, let’s call him Tim, was a very intelligent professional within our field. Tim had sharp cognitive abilities that made him quick and witty and able to ask poignant questions. And Tim had deeply rooted task knowledge within the organization, as his earlier jobs were in analytical and risk mitigation roles that exposed him to all people and processes across the organization. Looking in from the outside, Tim’s strengths aligned well with leadership trait research through time as intelligence (Stogdill, 1948; Mann, 1959; Lord, DeVader, and Alliger, 1986), cognitive ability (Kirkpatrick and Locke, 1991; Zaccaro, Kemp, and Bader, 2017), and task knowledge (Kirkpatrick and Locke, 1991) all represent the cerebral side of leadership. After all, if a person is named a leader, they should know about what the people they are leading are supposed to be doing.

 

However, in my former department, the story was really all about why Tim was selected by the administration, the leadership traits that were absent or underdeveloped, and the impact that Tim’s incomplete set of leadership traits had upon the people he was leading. The other employees of the organization, particularly my peers whose careers spanned from months to decades within the organization, were certain that Tim was selected by the administration exactly because he was incomplete. Tim was known to be an executor throughout his earlier career—his superiors told him what to do, and he got it done in ways that made the administration happy. That trait did not change in his leadership assignment, much to the chagrin of his department’s employees.

 

Our department was filled with specialized professionals, with years of education and experience, and hired to the department through a very competitive hiring process. While our leader, Tim would dutifully communicate the administration’s wishes for what the department’s employees must do, how they will do it, the timeline for its completion, and the priority they should place on the task. Tim, and the administration, were undermining the very strengths of the employees that made the department one of the best in the industry. The department’s senior employees carefully worded their concerns in a department meeting with Tim and a visiting administrator, communicating their need for greater autonomy in their work in order to fulfill the organization’s mission. Tim and the administrator said that they “really heard” us. Nothing about Tim or his leadership approach ever changed.

 

At the time of his appointment, Tim was never going to be an empowering, motivating, socially aware, confident, or problem-solving leader of the department in the way that leadership traits could be best expressed. The administration did not want a leader with those modern leadership traits—they wanted a conduit to channel their voice directly to the department’s employees. Tim was not the type of emotionally intelligent (Zaccaro et al., 2017) leader to differentiate his treatment of his employees based on their needs or personalities—we all were treated with the same voice, tone, and approach. Tim was not a confident (Kirkpatrick and Locke, 1991) leader who would face challenges and inspire his department members to rally to a cause—we only heard from him what the administration intended for us to do. Tim didn’t really even have the initiative (Stogdill, 1974) of a leader—we only ever heard what the administration had already decided, and Tim was reluctant to relay our ideas or concerns back to them. Tim was indeed knowledgeable—go to him with a process-oriented issue and he usually had an amazingly simple and wise method to overcome the problem—but Tim was not a leader, at least not for that situation in that department with those people.

 

The employees of the department suffered greatly during Tim’s leadership. His failures to advocate for his employees and encourage their original ideas and contributions to the organization’s overall work disrupted the collaborative spirit upon which the organization was said to have been founded. As a result, the very talented professionals of the department created silos and cliques where their own work and their preferred work partners became detached from the rest of the organization. Mistrust set-in, with a pervasive attitude of not wanting to do anything wrong or be seen as a troublemaker because Tim would tattle to the administration almost immediately. And the vacuum of leadership caused other department members to functionally rise up and fill the void, which only created infighting and more mistrust. Tim never saw his connection to the mess that was happening in his department, even during the now infamously disastrous “360º Evaluation” within our department where the department members lambasted Tim for his absence of leadership, the employees harshly criticized each other, and Tim fired back to his department’s employees his criticisms about their lack of compliance and failure to adopt the organizations initiatives. After this 360º evaluation captured in writing the full extent of our department’s dysfunction, the administration sent their “human resource development specialist” to first scold us in a full department staff meeting, and then asked us to fill-out the StrengthsFinder (now CliftonStrengths) assessment where our strengths could all be mapped in comparison to one another. This exercise could have shown how to better lead the talent in our department for the benefit of the organization. The mapping exercise instead emphasized how clique-ish and scattered we were as a team. I left the organization soon after HR got involved.

 

The administration’s simplistic view of leadership approaches ultimately set-up both Tim and the department for failure. The administration sought control over the department and its employees, and Tim had the traits that were best able to give the administration the control they sought, even if Tim was merely a conduit. Tim’s inability to relate to his employees, and lack of interest in motivating them to apply their innovative thinking to the mission of the organization, led them to have little respect for either him or other employees in the organization. And the absence of his leadership created opportunities for others to fill the void and functionally—although unofficially—attempt to lead the people in the organization, and that only led to contempt among the employees. The administration looked for someone with the traits they needed to fill the position, to check the box of the to-do list, and that’s exactly what they got—along with many more headaches, squandered opportunities, and lost talent.

 

References

 

Kirkpatrick, S. A., & Locke, E. A. (1991). Leadership: Do traits matter? The Executive, 5, 48–60.

 

Lord, R. G., DeVader, C. L., & Alliger, G. M. (1986). A meta-analysis of the relation between personality traits and leadership perceptions: An application of validity generalization procedures. Journal of Applied Psychology, 71, 402–410.

 

Mann, R. D. (1959). A review of the relationship between personality and performance in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 56, 241–270.

 

Stogdill, R. M. (1948). Personal factors associated with leadership: A survey of the literature. Journal of Psychology, 25, 35–71.

 

Zaccaro, S. J., Kemp, C., & Bader, P. (2017). Leader traits and attributes. In J. Antonakis, A. T. Cianciolo, & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), The nature of leadership (3rd ed., pp. 29–55). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

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