21st Century Leadership: An Interview with Joseph Rost
Russ Volckmann
05-18-05
Q: I would like to begin by talking about what I have described to others as an extraordinary piece of work: your book, Leadership for the 21st Century. I find it extraordinary first because of your extensive review of the leadership literature while searching for definitions of leadership and second for the conclusions that you reached. Would you summarize the major themes from that work?
A: I’ll see if I can. I looked through a number of books and articles. I did not use textbooks in my review except for one. I used books and articles written by academics and by what I would term practitioners, people who are writing from a more practical context because they’re in the field doing what they call leadership. Many of these works did not give a definition of leadership—a disconcerting large number, from my point of view. I concluded that these works were written by people who either (1) didn’t think that a definition was important, because they presumed that everybody knows what leadership is, or (2) found that defining leadership was too difficult and constraining. They didn’t want to define it because they wanted to have the freedom of writing about leadership any way they wanted. This means, of course, that they could use the word leadership in one chapter one way and use it in the second chapter another way. So, the purpose of this review was to try to see what the nature of leadership was in the 20th century up until 1989, which is when I wrote the book.
The second major theme of the book was to describe what I thought the nature of leadership would be in the 21st century. I created or developed a definition of leadership that was substantially different from that used in the 20th century.
These two themes are developed in the first and second halves of the book.
Q: You looked at the leadership literature in terms of all the different kinds of leadership theories; traits, skills, influence, role, as well as transactional and transformational notions of leadership. You offered a definition that seemed to represent what leadership has meant to people in the 20th century or in the Industrial Era, in particular. It reads as follows, “Leadership is great men and women with certain preferred traits influencing followers to do what the leaders wish in order to achieve group or organizational goals that reflect excellence defined as some kind of higher order effectiveness.” And, as I understand the implications of that definition, you basically concluded that for the Industrial Era leadership is defined as good management.
A: Your question raises two points. The first is that the long definition gathers together all of the major movements–theories, if you will–of the leadership literature in the 20th century. By including them all in a single sentence—a single definition—I made a statement that these models or views of leadership are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they fit together in an integrated whole quite easily and comfortably. It didn’t take any difficult or artificial word manipulation to put the whole output of 75 years of leadership studies into a succinct statement that says it all.
Then, the second point is this: If you analyze that sentence for its essence, the definition is all about good management, good in the sense of being effective, successful or well done, not in the sense of being morally efficacious. I might add that no one, prior to the publication of my book, had articulated a common or unifying theme of the leadership literature of the 20th century. On the contrary, the common wisdom throughout the latter half of the 20th century was that it was impossible to make sense of leadership studies, as there were so many different and conflicting views or understandings of what leadership is. So, I view the first half of the book as seminal and groundbreaking, as it destroys the myth that there is no common understanding of leadership in the literature. A lot of people don’t get this because, I suppose, the myth is so well accepted that it is very difficult for people to accept a different overarching concept that contradicts the myth.
Q: Did you have any response to your summary definition that was remarkable in any way?
A: Yes, the reaction to the first part of the book was fairly negative and markedly so. Readers say that it is too academic and boring. Who cares about all these definitions? What sense does it make to have readers trudge through all that past history? Trudge—isn’t that a great word?
The opinions about the book seem to change when they start reading chapter 5, which begins the discussion of leadership in the 21st century, the title of the book. That half of the book has been much more favorably reviewed.
Q: It seems to me that the point you are making in the early chapters is that how we define concepts like leader and leadership are fundamental in shaping the ways that we approach, not only doing it, but developing it.
A: Exactly. That is what I was trying to say. People don’t want to hear that message. They don’t want to read a book that goes over in minute detail the impact of defining or not defining leadership and what kind of developmental process we have had in the leadership literature over the last 50-75 years.
One of the reasons why leadership studies as a discipline hasn’t developed very well is that we have failed to learn from our mistakes. We failed to narrow things down to know what we are talking about. So, the sky remains the limit and leadership books in 2005 can range from psychological babble to the latest management fad. If we narrowed things down to a precise definition and only used the word leadership to write about what it is and how it’s practiced and so on, we would grow developmentally both as academics and as practitioners. Leadership as a discipline would develop exponentially.
Q: The Foreword to your book was written by James MacGregor Burns. He suggested that you didn’t emphasize the role of values, ethics and morality enough. In later writing that’s a subject you’ve addressed, that is, the role of conflict in “great leadership” as he used the notion. He notes that you tend to lean towards more of a consensus approach that he thinks would erode great leadership. I’m wondering if you have any comments about that.
A: Yes. Burns and I have talked about it several times. His view of conflicts in the process of leadership is very clear from his book. He believes that’s what energizes the process. To his credit I think we have to understand that Burns’ book is about political leadership. All his work in that large book is centered on politics, political organizations and governments. In that kind of organization conflict is more natural, because there are different parties and there are conflicting issues that are always on the agenda.
My view is that our political process would be better served if politicians and the many other people involved in a political issue would emphasize more consensual or collaborative processes than just the conflictual ones. Maybe one of the reasons why so many people are turned off about the political process these days is because of the intense conflict in politics, especially conflict motivated by partisan advantage or to get re-elected. I understand Burns’ point of view and he is accurate in summarizing mine. The model of leadership that I’m proposing is more consensual and collaborative than conflictual. I think that collaboration is much more energizing and enabling in solving serious problems in the 21st century.
Q: And the ethics piece?
A: The ethics issue involves a fairly clear distinction. In his definition of transformational leadership there is an ethical requirement that leaders raise other people up to higher levels of motivation and morality. My response is, who determines what the higher levels of motivation and higher levels of morality are in any particular issue?
Generally speaking, we can recognize Hitler and his collaborators as lowering motivation and morality because of all the horrible things they did. We can recognize Churchill and his collaborators as elevating morality, because they were fighting for freedom and civilization. But those historical examples are not very useful, because they don’t take into consideration any particular issue. Actually, if one delved into particular issues, Hitler and his people may have done some morally good things and Churchill and his allies may have done some morally bad things. But, in general, it is easy to evaluate Hitler as bad and Churchill as good if you collapse ten or more years of history into one sentence.
One of the innovative concepts I have brought to leadership studies is to view leadership as an episodic event (or series of events). From that point of view, the ethics of leadership has much more to do with process and product of a particular, significant change in an organization than it has to do with the personal morals of a leader. The process of making a change is an ethical issue because power and authority, especially if exercised in authoritarian and dictatorial ways, undermines the integrity of human beings, individually and as a group. The product of a significant change is also an ethical issue because doing the right thing is often difficult to determine. Thus, the ethics of an episodic event (a significant change) is much more complex than most people are led to believe.
There are hundreds of issues in today’s world about which people have serious differences regarding the ethics of various initiatives or solutions. Several examples are: keeping dying people alive artificially, retirement payments, drug research and availability, taxes to pay for social services, rich nations helping poor nations, gay marriage, sexual behaviors, privacy, minimum wages and health benefits, initiating a war to prevent terrorist attacks, stem cell research, death penalty, civil rights, copyright contracts, and so on. On these and other issues thousands and millions of people have diametrically opposed views as to what the right thing to do is.
In the end, I believe that creating an ethical imperative in an understanding of leadership is not acceptable. Does that summarize it?
Q: Yes, very well. In 1999, you gave a presentation to the Annual Conference of the International Leadership Association in Florida. In that presentation you were talking about ethics and morality while using the Clinton-Lewinski example. You made what I thought was a very interesting distinction about the role of ethics in leadership.
A: I was trying to say that people who may be leaders have a personal life and have a professional life. It is pretty cut and dried that if a leader steals money from the organization that this behavior is unethical. But it is not cut and dried when a leader of an organization during her/his personal time does things that some people do not approve of. If leaders do that, does that make them unethical leaders? In that paper, I argued that the ethics of leadership has more to do with what happens when the leaders (and collaborators) are doing leadership (that is, intending or making a significant changes in an organization) than it does with how they live their private lives.
Q: A dilemma with the Clinton example, of course, is that Lewinsky was in effect his employee. And that introduces some ethical issues within the organization.
A: Well, that certainly complicates the managerial and professional relationships that are supposed to exist between employers and employees. I don’t approve of adultery. So, I don’t approve of Clinton’s behaviors in this instance. But, the ethical issues of Clinton and his collaborators have more to do with how they responded to the massacre in Rwanda or the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the armed services—to name two examples of episodic leadership events—than they have to do with Clinton’s (or his collaborators’) sexual proclivities.
Morally good people don’t equate to morally good leadership and morally bad people don’t equate to morally bad leadership. Bad people can sometimes do very good leadership (episodic) acts and good people can sometimes do bad leadership (episodic) acts. There is no consistent correlation between personal goodness and leadership goodness.
Part of the problem here is equating leadership with leaders. If one does not buy into that equation, in other words, that other people beyond leaders do leadership, then the ethics of leadership becomes immensely more complicated.
Q: This relates to a concept that you’ve already mentioned that is very important in your approach to leadership. It’s one that I really resonate with. I described in one place, a leader as being a snapshot and leadership as a movie. The snapshot is an episodic event and the movie is an ongoing process over time. Leaders can pop up from many, many places over time. I noticed in your work that you used this idea of leadership as an emergent property of a system.
A: Those aren’t the words I would use, but yes, that’s what I’m suggesting. In my recent work, I have suggested that leadership exists in that organizational space wherein relationships develop and operate to effect significant changes. To that extent, it is systemic, especially in the organic and postmodern sense of that word. So, one has to repeat over and over again, leadership does not reside in a person or even several persons. Leadership resides in a relationship among people.
This understanding of leadership requires organizational change at the structural and systemic levels. Many organizations need a big dose of democracy so as to create that space where relationships can develop and flourish.
You asked earlier about more recent thoughts on leadership after the book was written. One that I could point to is the concept of the episodic nature of leadership. There is nothing explicated stated in the book about the episodic nature of leadership. There are some implied ideas, but the reader would have to read between the lines.
Subsequent to writing the book, I became very enamored with the concept of the episodic nature of leadership. People don’t go around doing leadership twenty-four hours a day. If they did, they’d go crazy in less than a year. One of the background assumptions I hold dearly is that the notion of leadership needs to be limited and boxed in more tightly. People have thought of leadership in the past as being all things to al people. Leadership is not that all encompassing.
So, we have to ask how we can distinguish between leadership and all those other things that make the world go round. That means we have to limit what we are studying and what we are researching and writing about. A definition of leadership must limit what is leadership and what leadership is not.
If you think of leadership as an episodic series of events intending significant change, there has to b e other things that people in groups and organizations do besides leadership. The episodic nature of leadership indicates to us that leadership is embedded in certain activities done by people about a certain issue.
Q: You have suggested that the industrial paradigm in which leadership definitions are couched is losing its hold. As you would say, in people’s minds and hearts there is a post-industrial culture that is rising. You described yourself as a futurist. Could you say more about that and how you see the postindustrial era unfolding?
A: The futurist part of me has been developed in the last 20 years by going to futurist conferences, reading futurist books, teaching a course called “Leadership in the Future,” and other activities in which I have collaborated with other futurists. My tendency in teaching was to get students in the frame of mind that what they were learning had to be usable in the future, not just in the past. Out of that developed my interest in what leadership would look like in the 21st century. Is it going to be the same as it was in the 20th or not? This really needs to be discussed more than in a single graduate class and so we tried to make that a theme in all of our leadership classes.
Q: What is it about the shift into the 21st century? What are the variables in this postindustrial era that you think are significant in terms of redefining leadership?
A: I can point to two or three things. The first and most important one is I don’t think that serious problems are being solved in most of our organizations. In order to solve them, fundamental changes have to be made in how organizations govern themselves and the dynamics of leadership in an organization. This applies to business, nonprofit and governmental organizations. I don’t see any essential differences in these organizations, except that I believe that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that political organizations find it difficult to solve major problems.
The second thing is that the people in the Western world, in particular, are less willing to play a follower role and just do what other people say they should do. They are more interested in being part of a process that gives them some influence and impact on major decisions being made in organizations. What we used to have in the early and middle part of the 20th century, when people generally were submissive, has changed dramatically in the last 25 years. These changes will grow exponentially in the 21stth century. A model of leadership that emphasizes the top person or the one person doing leadership no longer resonates with people in general.
The third thing is that values are changing, both societal and individual values. There are signs pointing each way, but the positive view of the world is towards more emphasis on wholeness or sustainability in solving difficult issues and making progress. The negative view is that individualism is rampant and people are as corrupt and dishonest as they were a hundred years ago. The great leader approach is still popular. We need strong individuals to maintain order and control. I suppose it is two different worldviews. The worldview that emphasizes the individualistic and personal importance and rights of people is losing its hold in societies.
The fourth one would be various disciplines are having the same problems and are thinking along the same lines as futurists in leadership. Medicine would be a good example where old paradigms are not adequate to deal with health problems of the modern age. You have all these different things happening in medicine. There are new paradigms in the natural sciences, psychology and religion.
Different people can see different things when they try to describe worldviews. I look at these different disciplines and see that they’re looking towards new ways of thinking to help understand what’s going on in the world. Leadership as a discipline is following suit; it is having the same problems with the old language and the old assumptions.
Q: There is clearly evidence of growing movements in cross-disciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to go along with what you are talking about.
A: When we studied history in the 1950s when I went to college, it was a study of European history. But now, history is a history of the world, including non-developed countries, social movements and other things besides wars. If you look at how history is being taught in 2005, it’s very, very different. This new approach is not an accident or just evolutionary. It was planned, fought-over, fundamental change that involved a lot of historians.
Q: So these changing circumstances require a different way of thinking about leadership. I’m going to read your definition of leadership in the post-industrial era that you offered in the book. We can compare and contrast this with the earlier definition, if you like. “Leadership is an influence relationship among leaders and collaborators who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purposes.” How would you comment on that?
A: This definition is directly the opposite of all popular definitions of leadership from the 20th century, which emphasized power and control, individual leaders doing leadership and followers doing followership, and the view that the top-level decision-maker is the only person who does leadership. The long definition that you referred to earlier in the interview summarizes this industrial understand of leadership.
The collaborative definition requires four essential elements to be present if a series of activities are to be labeled leadership. The first is that the activities be influential, that, is, noncoercive. The second is that the activities be done by people in a relationship. The third is that the activities involve a real significant change. And the fourth element is that the activities reflect the purposes of the people in the relationship, not just a single person. All of these standards insure collaboration rather than the notion that leadership is a great leader doing great things.
Q: You indicated earlier that the response to this part of the book where you are elaborating that definition was different from the first part of the book. Would you care to comment on that?
A: Yes, I’d like to very much. As background for this answer, I’d like to say that authors don’t get a huge response about what they write. I’ve talked to other authors about this experience, and they all said the same thing. Perhaps writers of books that make the New York Times bestseller list have a different experience, but I haven’t talked to any of them. Thus, our ability to understand how people respond to what we have written in a book is very limited.
With that proviso in mind, the limited feedback I have had from readers is very positive about the chapters in the book that develop the definition of collaborative leadership. The response is actually overwhelmingly enthusiastic. I should also state that the most ardent supporters are those who are in some kind of group that traditionally lacked power and authority or that have been discriminated against. That response is quite understandable since collaborative leadership reflects, for want of a better term, a bottom-up approach.
An alternative response has been quite consistent also–the response of the realists.
Agreeing with the collaborative approach to leadership is easy. It is much harder to put it to work, to practice it. So, the skeptics respond that it is a wonderful idea (or even worse, that it is nice and good as a theory) but it won’t work in the real world of organizations. Unfortunately, the experience of the last 15 years favors the skeptics. My view is that the difficulty in practicing collaborative leadership is probably as hard in 2005 as it was in 1990 when I wrote the book. This situation bothers me a great deal, and it is the source of some discouragement. I had hoped that we would be further along on the road to collaboration than we are.
However, my view is still the same. Collaborative leadership is the wave of the future. I agree that collaborative leadership is hard, but I do not agree that it is impractical or, worse, impossible. I might not see it in my lifetime, but I think that our understanding of leadership has to change. The revolution of people power is too strong.
Q: I will share with you that I was having a conversation with Denny Roberts at the Miami University of Ohio and his background is educational leadership. He’s very familiar with your work and he cited a number of different programs around developing student leadership in universities that are very influenced by your ideas.
A: I’m well aware of the work they’re doing there, not in detail, but in general. I gave a seminar to what can loosely be called leadership development people in Student Affairs. They took to this stuff like a duck takes to water. So I think they are oriented to this view of leadership in a sense by the nature of what they’re doing and by their own futuristic thinking.
Students who are twenty years old need future models to work with as opposed to just doing the old models of the past. But that said, I still think that the predominant models of leadership in Student Affairs programs is quite traditional. If you did a large survey of the universities in the United States I think the results would show a rather old-fashioned understanding of leadership. The University of Miami and other universities that use the collaborative model would be the exception, not the rule.
Just to follow up on that, a lot of what I understand to be Student Affairs sponsored leadership seminars and workshops provided for university students have to do with facilitating groups, how to build an agenda, how to develop an action plan and how to get things done.
Q: Sounds like management.
A: Yes, very management oriented.
Q: Let’s talk a little bit about some of the suggestions you have for developing leaders based on the shift in thinking that you’ve done. And if I can, I’ll just take them one by one from your article, “Leadership Development in the New Millennium” and have you comment on them. The first was, “Stop concentrating on the leader.”
A: Which is pretty elemental! In other words if you want to develop leadership in a university or in a college, you can’t run leadership seminars and just invite people who are known leaders, or even worse, managers in the university or the college. You have to multiply that seminar by ten or fifteen and get hundreds of people involved. You can’t develop a bottom-up approach by providing leadership seminars to only the people on the top of the hierarchy.
Q: Because that way, you are in effect feeding the leadership potential of the organization?
A: Yes, and you’re putting new thoughts into people’s minds. Not just the students who are elected to the university student council, but lots of other students who have the motivation and energy to participate in activities that promote significant change.
Q: In parallel to that, you also suggest that we don’t know how to develop leaders.
A: That’s a whole different question, and I suppose that’s a little overstated. I think we know some of how to develop leaders but we certainly know a lot more about how to develop old-style leaders than new style leaders.
Q: Your point was to emphasize leadership rather than focusing on developing individual leaders.
A: Yes, absolutely. If you want to develop leaders, we probably know quite a bit about that. But the problem is that people and organizations spend all this money on developing leaders in organizations but they don’t spend much money at all in diversifying the leaders throughout the organization. Or, put another way, they don’t spend money on developing a more modern idea of leadership in the organization, the idea that collaborators are essential to the leadership relationship in organizations. I mean that more people take charge of leadership processes in an organization than just a few managers.
Q: Would it also mean that in developing leaders, we’re not just talking about developing individuals, but we’re talking about developing the culture and the systems of the organization as well, to support the emergence of leadership?
A: Yes, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. You said it as well as it could be said. The more widespread leadership development is the more people understand that they’ve got a part to play in influencing what is going to happen in an organization, especially when significant changes are planned.
Q: Another item you suggest is that we conceive of leadership as an episodic affair— something we’ve already talked—to get rid of the notion that leadership is only what works, that leadership is always a successful process or that it is always about high performance.
A: That’s a very important concept for people to get. The traditional definition that you read earlier says that leadership occurs when something good happens, good meaning effective or successful. I maintain that leadership happens even if the project to change an organization fails, because a failed project always changes something. And then if a project fails in 2001, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to fail in 2003. While the project may fail in 2001, some people bring it back again a year or two years later, maybe with some different ideas or approaches, and it goes through.
Q: In any case, in all of those examples, leadership does emerge.
A: Sure. And not only emerge, but it happens because people are using an influence process that is promoting change that reflect their common views, their common purposes. That’s what leadership is, so there’s nothing in the definition that says that it has to be a success or that it has to be a 100% successful. Sometimes maybe it could be 50% successful and 50% not.
Q: As a result, you do suggest that we train people in influence skills?
A: Yes. I don’t disparage training people how to run a meeting, especially if they’re younger. That’s probably a fairly important managerial skill as well as a leadership skill at times. But they have to translate that into what is the meeting for? Is it to change something or is the meeting just to run the daily operation. Do you understand what I’m saying?
Q: Yes, I do. That basically there are those management skills that are important, but within the context of those management processes, there’s a dynamic of influence and we need to help people understand how to be able to do that effectively. This includes things like understanding strategy and analysis, the use of metaphors, helping them learn how to persuade through the written word as well as the spoken word, and so on.
A: Absolutely.
Q: Okay. So another one was, “To develop people to work within noncoercive relationships.” This is in the context of mutual influence.
A: Yes. A lot of what happens in organizations is dictated by managers. To get away from that, things have to get into a context where managers, if they’re present at a meeting, give up their right to authorize what happens. Also, meetings need to influence how issues are addressed. If the outcome of the meeting is predetermined, leadership cannot emerge. There may be occasions when that kind of thing has to happen, but then that series of activities is not leadership. There are various forms of coercion, but people have to learn how to relate to one another in a relationship that’s influenced based. That’s the whole point of collaborative leadership.
Q: And in order to do that, they have to have a different understanding of change and understand what you call “real, significant change.”
A: Yes, as opposed to incremental, pseudo or symbolic change. And the change must be significant as opposed to changing little details that don’t make any difference.
Q: So this is a shift that involves how people think about things?
A: Yes. It involves a change in getting people to even think about such things. The attitude of the 20th century was that we hire managers to do those things. That’s what they’re paid for. Let us go about doing the things that we’re paid to do. In an industrial model people are paid to do management, not to do leadership. In a postindustrial model everyone can or should be paid to do leadership as part of their position. It’s part of being a member of the organization and it’s not the sole right and responsibility of a few people to do leadership. This is the bottom-up approach. It’s a public interest and a common good approach. It also makes sense, common sense.
There are many engrained assumptions that we have about leadership in organizations. We don’t just send out a memo saying that everybody is going to do leadership in this organization and then expect that to change people’s very deeply held assumptions.
Q: You have to engage in a development process that you’re outlining here I think.
A: Right.
Q: The final area I’m going to bring up is the one about reconstructing people’s basic worldview about life toward a collaborative orientation. How would you comment on that?
A: The liberal (in the traditional sense of the term) enlightenment approach upon which our nation was founded and which is embedded in our founding documents sets up an individualistic worldview as opposed to a collaborative or a common ground view. That individualistic worldview has been developed and consistently promoted in ways that it is almost part of our psychics. Not in my backyard is a good summary of this worldview. So, a collaborative approach that aims to reflect a common ground among participants in a leadership relationship is a hard sell for people who have been indoctrinated in an individualistic worldview.
Our organizations are systemically structured to support this worldview. That is the idea that managers are paid to manage and laborers are paid to labor. But times have changed and the inadequacy of the individualistic worldview are evident everywhere. As an example, if all that the staff members in a school or university were worried about was their turf, their salaries, their budgets and their discipline—that they’re part of a mechanical process of making a product or giving students an education— then that’s a very individualist perspective of what the job of an educator or the process of education is all about. As long as everybody has an individualistic view of their part in the organization, they’re going to have a hard time with any collaborative model. So, in essence, the worldview of organizations has to change in the 21st century.
Q: We’re speaking to something that is at the heart of considerations in integral theory: people are going to be at different developmental levels and as a consequence, their worldviews are going to vary. It’s unrealistic for us to expect everybody to make the kind of shift that would be required here at the same time. Another strategy might be to find ways of working so that we can integrate the perspectives and approaches of different worldviews in a process that would work and that would lead to real change as you’re talking about.
A: Yes. People in organizations will be at different developmental levels and to complicate matters, they also will have different moral values. But, I suppose from a cultural perspective, there may have to be some common elements and interests. If people are expected to think that they have a significant role to play in an organization, in other words it’s not just the managers who make all the important decisions, then this cultural ethic has to be part of the developmental process inside the organization. If people have to learn new ways of thinking about organizations, then the old ways of thinking have to be addressed explicitly. This kind of cultural change doesn’t just happen by the changing times in a society or by osmosis. It has to be pursued—developed—by people inside the organization to make this change of worldviews happen.
A good example of this kind of cultural change might be at Southwest Airlines. They have done a lot to change airline people’s thinking about the very business they’re in and how to run a successful airline with very involved people at all levels. They’ve done this all on purpose. This was not an accident. Various strategies were used in large and small groups suggesting ways in which the company could promote different worldviews than the ones that the old, traditional airlines had. I suppose that’s what I’m thinking, that somehow the collaborative message has to be gotten across. We must change the culture of organizations a bit before we can expect people to do collaborative leadership.
Q: So they can get that message at the level of development they are at because it could be framed in those terms.
A: Yes. I don’t think that such cultural change occurs in a mechanical way or a staccato approach, everyone marching along to the same drummer.
Q: Great. One of the things you said to me when we were setting up this interview was that you liked to do your homework. I have the impression that you’ve taken a look a little bit at some of the literature that’s on my website, is that correct?
A: Yes, I read quite a few articles, but I haven’t really got it all together yet. I haven’t done as much homework as I wanted to do. Why, did you want to ask me something?
Q: I was wondering if you have encountered anything in whatever explorations you’ve done that has peaked your interest around how an integral approach might be appropriate to the things that you’re suggesting are important for us to be doing?
A: The answer so far is: I haven’t been able to figure that out. It seems to me that there is some bifurcation in the integral approach to leadership of developing individuals, but there are also significant or serious concerns that leadership is a group process and that the two views have to be integrated or welded together.
Q: The way I would frame it is that an integral perspective would suggest that all leadership events involve the individual and the organization and it involves things that we can observe and things we can’t observe. The things we can observe are the behaviors, the systems, the processes and the structures. The things that are harder to observe are the values and the belief systems held by individuals and the culture of that system. If we’re going to look at leadership, all of those variables are present in any leadership episode or any leadership process over time.
A: Yes. That comes through to some extent in what I’ve read.
Q: Another aspect of the model, the map of an integral approach, is the idea of lines or streams of development as aspects of leadership development. In integral theory we recognize that there are multiple lines that we can define in a variety of ways, but typically would include things like intellectual and emotional intelligence or other cognitive dimensions, physical development, spiritual development, development of capabilities in relationships, a variety of things like that. It seems to me from the way that you’ve talked about leadership development, that that idea would be very supportive of what you’ve been talking about.
A: Yes, but I a bit ambivalent about that approach. I have to say that to some extent, developmental psychology and the whole idea of development has an individualistic or personalistic tone to it. If that’s the case, then of course, this approach brings us back to the CEO or the executive or the great man or great woman who does things to develop him or herself so that he or she can be a better leader. What I have been saying, I believe, is that we should place less emphasis on developing the leader and pay more attention to developing people at all levels of the organization.
Then, of course, there is this view out there that leadership development is primarily about the content of whatever profession in which we work. Thus, you have educational leadership programs in universities that require the students to study the content of education much more than the process of leadership.
We also have books out there that suggest fathers and mothers need leadership development to be better parents. Or books which suggest that psychologists or religious clergy need leadership development to be better counselors or ministers, or that doctors and nurses need leadership development to be better medical practitioners. So, on and on it goes. We must understand that leadership development is not a cure-all for all the sins of the world. People need leadership development to be able to do leadership in organizations. So, I have mixed feelings about this whole thing.
Q: In addition to the things that I mentioned, which were really more about the individual, there are corresponding lines of development for the culture and for the systems that the individual is a part of. So, if we take those into consideration, does that alter your point of view?
A: Yes, that’s a better way of putting it to my way of thinking. In other words, I’m more interested in the development of an organization, society and groups than I am of individuals. Since leadership is, by its very nature a group activity that takes place over time, people need development in group decision-making. This is hard; this is very difficult.
Q: It is hard because we’re talking about some of the things that you said were coming along in the future: reaching out and embracing a variety of different perspectives from different theories and from different disciplines and trying to find some way to integrate these into something that makes sense. And this is the cutting edge, isn’t it?
A: Yes. I don’t want to come off sounding as if people shouldn’t develop themselves. That would be stupid to say and I’m not trying to say that. What I’m trying to say is that the emphasis on personal development has been so profound in this individualistic culture that as a society, as an organization or as groups, we have not seriously considered the importance of collective development in organizations by comparison.
Q: I’m reminded of James O’Toole’s chapter in The Future of Leadership. I’m not sure if you’ve seen that or not.
A: Yes, I have, but it has been awhile since I have read it.
Q: Well, basically he’s reporting on a USC study with the consulting firm he was associated with and may still be. Essentially his findings are about how essential it is to develop the support systems for leadership in organizations and recognizing that many of those structures and systems—reward systems, communication systems, and so on—are essential to support the growth of effective leadership in organizations.
A: Right. I would say that same thing. That we’ve put all our money into personal development and a little money into support systems that support a collaborative view of organizations.
If you want the truth about my views of what’s going on, I suppose that I was more optimistic in 1990 (when I wrote the book) than I had a right to be and things certainly have not changed as much as I thought they might have changed in 15 years. There are still very significant signs of the old model of leadership in operation all over the world and particularly in the United States, from President Bush on down. Probably, one of the erroneous conclusions in the book that’s more implicit than explicit is that we’re on the verge of a large breakthrough. It’s clear that breakthrough has not broken through.
Q: Yes, any advice for those who would like to be involved in trying to make that happen?
A: Patience! That advice is coming from a very impatient man. Focus on the good things that are happening—and they are happening—and make a big deal out of them. Play them up and don’t let the bad things that are happening get you down.
Another would be courage. Take risks to establish collaborative cultures and developmental structures in organizations.
A final piece of advice is, speak up both in print and in practice. Enable collaboration through your words and put those words into practice. The time for accepting the old elite model is out. Speak out every time you have a chance. Become an activist and encourage others to become activists.
Q: Joseph, is there anything I haven’t asked you that you wished I had?
A: I think that we’re finished. But let me say a bit more about the reception regarding the book. We have already talked about the people who dislike the first four chapters and love the last four. Okay, that’s pretty common. Another kind of reception is from people who are ensconced and deeply rooted in the old paradigm of leadership. That reception can be so adamant that you would think that I’m destroying their faith in everything they believe in. I’ve have people who have actually said to me: “ You are just destroying everything that I believe in.
Q: I’m amazed.
A: It has happened a number of times. Actually, I have tried not to be destructive, as I have consistently stated that we need good management in organization. The belief that I am trying to destroy is calling good management leadership.
There is another kind of reception—the reception from people who have written leadership books in the 1960s, 70s and 80s who I criticized rather significantly as being cemented or stuck in an old rut and can’t get out of it. So they’re not very happy about my book. That includes a large number of people who are very much oriented to the great man view of leadership in all its forms. There are a lot of people who still ride on the coattails of these authors.
There are people who are very much into the great person view of leadership. Their reactions to my comments, which have been quite explicit against that idea that one person does leadership, have been polite but fairly negative. Or the comments are ignored. Beyond those reactions, I want to emphasize that I have gotten a great deal of positive feedback and I have been very encouraged by the people who think that collaborative leadership is the wave of the future.
Q: Are you doing anymore writing?
A: No, not right now. I haven’t been able to put my mind to it. I’m either psychologically too discouraged or I don’t have the psychic energy to do the hard work that writing serious stuff requires. The other problem is that I’ve had some health issues and that’s probably a more realistic reason why I haven’t done much writing in the last five years.
Q: Is there anybody that you see in the field of leadership studies, younger scholars, who are doing what you would point our attention to?
A: No, not as far as written books or articles go. There are certainly people who are out there doing graduate and undergraduate classes and who are using a more collaborative model. I read on your website about scenarios and I’ve been a particular fan of scenarios for a long time, meaning maybe 15 years. I don’t know if you’ve heard of or read a book called Creating Better Futures by James Ogilvy?
This is one of the best books I’ve read in the last five years. This person is clearly not a leadership scholar. He doesn’t talk in leadership terms, but everything that he writes can be translated to leadership very easily. I think that you would probably like his work a lot.
This scarcity of innovative books is part of the problem in leadership studies. During my teaching career, I would choose books that were not directly leadership oriented books and use them in classes to bring new ideas about leadership into the leadership program. One almost has to go out of the discipline to get some new ideas.
Q: Absolutely and I think that one of the bright spots is that more and more people are doing that.
A: Yes.
Q: Joseph, thank you so very much for taking the time for this interview.
A: Thank you. I appreciate you calling me. I hope I made some sense.
Q: You haven’t lost any of your passion. Take care.