What is Leadership?
I resonate with Richard Barker’s argument that leadership still isn’t really a construct. Leadership studies are all over the map and almost every scholar you read has a different definition, many of which are contradictory.
It seems often that almost anything can be leadership to the point that everything is leadership, which makes nothing leadership. So says Washbush in his provocative article called, aptly, There’s No Such Thing as Leadership, Revisited (2005). There is no single concept or definition that has been able to accommodate leadership as an ongoing, continuous social process. Different conceptions highlight different facets or dimensions, but always at the expense of some equally valid component. On the other hand, many attempts to find the universal leadership principle—the proverbial Holy Grail of leadership studies—produce constructs which are not readily discernible from other complex human social activities: leadership versus management, motivation, decision-making, etc.
Perhaps leadership is nothing more than a collection of different complexities interacting in various ways in response to the particular needs of various contexts. Maybe there is no such thing as a leadership construct, and what we refer to as leadership is not a thing, but an array of things that can be arranged in an infinite number of ways.
That being said, there is the need for a common but distinctive organizing principle. Namely, the relationships between people. Karl Weick’s conception of sense-making and interdependence is an apt description for the underlying realities of shared corporate life. To date, the most meaningful and helpful body of thinking on this is the application of complexity theory to organizational studies. The conception of an organization as a complex, open, adaptive system in which purpose, direction, structure, and behavior emerges out of the interaction of its agents within the organization and with its environment is far more congruent with a Scriptural vision of human life and community. It also provides a means of resolving some of the inherent difficulties presented by an industrial model of leadership. Issues such as shared leadership, the role and origin of vision, empowerment, leaderless teams, and group dynamics all make more sense in an open systems framework.
A Definition of Leadership
So, in the spirit of current leadership studies, I offer my own definition here: Leadership is the ongoing, dynamic organizing of personal interaction and potential towards a common end.
This is a generic version of my thinking. A more realistic and distinctly Christian understanding reads: Leadership is the ongoing, dynamic, Spirit-guided organizing of personal interaction and potential towards a divinely-appointed end.
In future posts, I will expand on each of the elements of this definition.
