Is it possible that our current approach to leadership is insufficient for creating and developing leaders? Given the amount of time and money that is spent on leader development, along with the number of books and articles that have been written on the subject, you would think that we would have a much better track record on producing high quality leaders by now. That we don’t have a better track record suggests that our understanding of leadership and our approach to its development may be misdirected, perhaps even misinformed.
Our current approach to leaders and leadership can perhaps best be crudely summarized as follows: “leaders are people who have particular qualities and engage in particular behaviors that result in their being people others choose to follow”. Leaders, for example, have charisma and inspire people with compelling visions. They “walk their talk” while enabling and empowering others to act to challenge the status quo and bring about a new future.
Based on this approach, and its many variations, our formula for developing leaders could be called the “Have-Do-Be Formula”. The application of this formula leads us to employ various training and development techniques to give leaders who wish to become more effective, or non-leaders seeking to become leaders, those qualities (the “have’s”) and practices (the “do’s”) which, if successfully employed, will result in their being leaders or more effective leaders. The challenge confronting academics, consultants, coaches, and trainers, therefore, is to identify THE “have’s” and “do’s” which truly define leaders and effective leadership and to successfully and effectively convey those to current and prospective leaders so that they too may exhibit them. That we have not yet identified this holy grail of “have’s and do’s” is evidenced by the countless number of books and articles released every year on the subject of leadership.
Given the pervasiveness of the “Have-Do-Be Formula”, why is it that we do not see far more dramatic results in the development of leaders and leadership? One explanation is that although we have made substantial progress, we still haven’t discovered the essential “have’s and do’s” of leaders and effective leadership. So the search goes on. A second explanation is that our training and development is not completely effective, so even though if we have found the essential “have’s and do’s”, we aren’t able to develop them fully in others. Yet a third explanation is that we are good at training people in the essential “have’s and do’s”, it just that they do not fully implement them.
No doubt there is some validity to each of these explanations. What is somewhat disturbing, however, is that none of these explanations focus on whether the underlying formula is valid. After years of teaching practicing managers and reading the literature on leadership, I have come to question the validity of the underlying model and no longer teach it in my MBA management classes.
The “Have-Do-Be Formula” assumes leaders and leadership exist independent of assessment and interpretation. That is, it assumes there ARE leaders and there IS leadership as an objective occurrence in the world that any competent observer can see and that differences in perceptions are either contextual differences or error variance. But what if we are not simply describing some objective state or condition, but are instead reporting on a contextualized interpretation based on some experience? That is, what if the “have’s and do’s” we believe lead to being a leader have nothing to do with being a leader or effective leadership, but are simply the result of our attempts to differentiate, after the fact, between people we call leaders and people we don’t? If this is the case, then we are treating the consequences of leadership and being a leader (i.e., the “have’s and do’s”) as the causes. What this means is that rather than a “Have-Do-Be Formula”, we would have a “Be-Do-Have Formula”.
What do you think?
