Managing Leadership^®

Books on individual leadership, rather amazingly, continue to come out, and continue to promise great things from the superlative leaders their secrets will help readers become. What they also all do, though, is assume that there is no controversy regarding the location of leadership: it is in individuals, and emanates from them into the organizations which they grace with their presence. Indeed, many of these observers go so far as to say that the organization exists to give expression to the leader’s leadership – or, at least, must re-form itself around the unique ways each leader exhibits that leadership.

William Tate, a consultant in the United Kingdom with extensive experience as a senior manager, offers some long-overdue questions about these assumptions in his new book, “The Search for Leadership: An Organizational Perspective.” It must be said that he neither denies the essential concept of individual leadership, nor the destructive contention that it is separate from and superior to management. Indeed, he, curiously, offers a fairly rigorous justification of it.

The value he adds, though, is in the context in which he places the concept. Tate asks with disciplined focus what, precisely, leadership in organizations is intended to serve, and how we are to make sure that it does so. In the course of this, he comes to conclusions regarding the modern leadership movement that echo many of those expressed on this site. He is concerned that it has produced not merely an understanding of leadership that is untethered from the purpose it might ordinarily be expected to pursue, but that also has generated an industry that perpetuates fundamental errors in perspective and practice that can no longer be tolerated.

For example, he argues that leadership, in a phrase found often in these pages, should be “thought of as a resource to be managed.” This observation is the inevitable expression of the heart of his argument: that it is well-past time to stop thinking of leadership as principally a personal attribute, but rather to understand it as a set of actions that take place within and for the betterment of the organization.

He is especially concerned with the problem of leadership development as it is typically conceived and undertaken in contemporary organizations. He insists that it must not be allowed to continue as a patchwork of personal improvement modules pursued independently of the needs of the outfit.

The first step in the creation of such programs, he laments, is ordinarily an almost eerie disassociation from the organization’s needs. Rather, developers turn earnestly but disconnectedly to the assemblage of boilerplate individual leadership components. He argues repeatedly that such programs should begin not with a discussion of what the attendees may need, but of what the organization needs from the leadership it wishes to generate and benefit from in its strategic and operational efforts.

Tate urges us to understand that “the organization is not a passive vessel waiting to have leadership poured into it.” “The popular mistake made by executives and their coaches,” he notes, “is to assume or pretend that leaders have more control than they really do.” To underscore this, he quotes a colleague on the attendant attribution error:

The tendency [is] for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviours, while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences. In other words, people assume that what a person does is based more on what kind of person he or she is, rather than the social and environmental forces at work on that person.”

Tate is concerned not only that leadership should be conceived of as something in the service of and bound to the organization – rather than the reverse – but also that it should be supervised, held accountable, and redirected when necessary. As he says, “there is a need to manage leadership, however oxymoronic that may sound.”

But, of course, it’s not oxymoronic at all, despite the author’s curious presentation in sundry chapters of the standard patter about what leadership is, who expresses it, and how it is even presumably superior to management. At bottom, he rightly makes a strong case for the view that leadership is, at the very least, inferior to the organization.

And he does so in an engaging, readable manner, reinforced with vivid expression and memorable metaphors. This book represents an important full forward step in the right direction toward an effective understanding of leadership – and how to rein it in.

Buy “The Search for Leadership,” by William Tate. You will enjoy it, and find yourself considering questions that you may not have encountered before, deepening and enriching your strategic effectiveness as a manager.

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Today’s tip: Many think that the notion of raising a family and running a business is also oxymoronic. But the truth is that it most decidedly is a logical – and even a natural – proposition. Please see this Forbes.com column by Sramana Mitra for an excellent illustration of why and how.

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