Ecology of Leadership

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY “LEADERS”?

“To become a leader, you must first become a human being,” said Confucius, more than twenty-five hundred years ago. In the famous Great Learning, Confucius lays out a developmental theory in terms of seven “meditative spaces” of leadership cultivation. These ideas find parallels in wisdom traditions around the world. Indeed, wisdom itself is one of the oldest ideas associated with leadership.

Unfortunately, this perspective on leading has almost been lost today. The very word “leader” has come to refer largely to positional authority, a synonym for top management—as when people say, “Change will only happen if it is driven by the leaders,” or “The problem here is our leadership.” Regardless of the accuracy of such statements, there is a deeper message. Such statements point to particular people in top management jobs and refer to them as “the leaders.” Why not just say “our senior management” or “our executive managers”? Certainly that would be less ambiguous. But we encode a broader message when we refer to such people as the leaders. That message is that the only people with power to bring about change are those at the top of the hierarchy, not those further down. This represents a profound and tragic confusion. First, it declares that all others are not leaders and have little power to bring about change. Second, it oversimplifies a much more complex and important subject, how to understand the diverse roles of leaders at many levels and how to develop networks of leaders capable of sustaining deep change.

Recognizing this confusion some years ago, we began to think in terms of an “ecology of leadership” and how local line leaders, internal network leaders, and executive leaders contributed to this ecology. As we looked across diverse efforts at building learning cultures within the SoL network, it was clear that all three types of leaders were vital, albeit in different ways. Eventually, this view of distributed leadership was presented in The Dance of Change field-book, which examined ten recurring challenges in initiating and sustaining profound change and the interdependencies among leaders addressing these challenges.

Local line leaders, like Dave Marsing of Intel or Roger Saillant, formerly of Ford, are vital for integrating innovative practices into daily work: for testing the efficacy of systems thinking tools and for working with mental models, for deepening conversations and for building shared visions that connect to people’s reality, and for creating work environments where learning and working are integrated. Without effective local line leaders, new ideas—no matter how compelling—do not get translated into action, and the intentions behind change initiatives from the top can easily be thwarted.

Network leaders, like Brigitte Tantawy-Monsou of Unilever or Ilean Galloway of Intel, are helpers, seed carriers, and connectors. They often work closely with local line leaders in building local capacity and integrating new practices. They are vital for spreading new ideas and practices from one working group to another and between organizations, and for connecting innovative line leaders with one another. They build larger networks that diffuse successful innovations and important learning and knowledge.

Executive leaders, like Vivienne Cox of BP and Les Omotani, formerly of the West Des Moines school system, shape the overall environment for innovation and change. They lead in developing guiding ideas about purpose, values, and vision for the enterprise as a whole. They do not have to be the sole source of these ideas; such ideas may come from many places. But they must take responsibility for ensuring the existence of credible and uplifting guiding ideas in the organization. Executive leaders are also vital for dealing with structural impediments to innovation, such as poorly designed measurement and reward systems. And they are role models who must embody values and aspirations if these are to be credible. In many ways, it is this symbolic impact of hierarchical authority that is most important for change, and most neglected. Effective executive leaders embrace the old dictum “Actions speak louder than words,” knowing that in any organization it applies especially to those who are most visible.

Each of these types of leaders needs the others. Local line leaders need executive leaders to understand and address larger systemic barriers to change, and network leaders to prevent isolation and to enable learning from peers. Network leaders need local line leaders to test ideas in practice, and executive leaders to translate local insights into broader organization-wide guidelines and standards. Executive leaders need local line leaders to move strategic aims from concept to capability, and network leaders to build larger networks for learning and change.

Cutting across these different organizational positions from which leaders operate are three fundamental roles that characterize all leaders’ work. In the original edition of The Fifth Discipline, I wrote, “Our traditional views of leaders—as special people who set the direction, make the key decisions, and energize the troops—are deeply rooted in an individualistic and nonsystemic worldview. Especially in the West, leaders are heroes—great men (and very occasionally women) who ‘rise to the fore’ in times of crisis. So long as such myths prevail, they reinforce a focus on short-term events and charismatic heroes rather than on systemic forces and collective learning. At its heart, the traditional view of leadership is based on assumptions of people’s powerlessness, their lack of personal vision and inability to master the forces of change, deficits which can be remedied only by a few great leaders.

“The new view of leadership in learning organizations centers on subtler and more important tasks. In a learning organization, leaders are designers, teachers, and stewards.” Today, I see these fundamental roles as being more important than ever, but I’ve also come to appreciate the difficulties and personal challenges they pose.