Leadership is commonly assumed to be based in influence processes. To me, this is an assumption worth looking at a little more closely. What follows is a contribution I made recently to a discussion on leadership and influence on LinkedIn.

Bud West has raised the topic of influence as a discussion on the ILA's Linked-In group pages. I find this really interesting as influence tends to be a sacred cow of leadership. For many scholars and others, influence is a defining characteristic of leadership, as in “leadership involves processes of influencing others toward organizational goals”. Discussion tends to happen only inside the walls of definitions like this. 

What if we allow the possibility that influence is one way of defining leadership – but not the only way? 

The belief that influence is a defining feature of leadership is closely tied in with the notion that leadership is what leaders do; that leadership is the province of leaders and only leaders. (In contrast, I prefer to think of leadership in process terms, allowing that both recognized leaders and others – non-leaders – can contribute to the work.) 

Influence-based leadership frameworks that center (explicitly or implicitly) on the leader tend to take as given that: 

• The leader can “see farther” than others, the leader knows best 
• If others have differing views/additional contributions, they will be able to speak up and will do so 
• The leader will be able to appreciate their perspectives, and incorporate their contributions into his/her own.

I’m not saying that influence is not useful as a frame for understanding leadership. It clearly is in some settings. But it’s one of a number of ways of understanding leadership. 

I had an interesting conversation recently with two learning and development people from a government organization. They’re reviewing their organization’s leadership development framework with a view to “refreshing” it. When this is done, they will go to the market seeking expressions of interest from leadership development providers. The people I spoke with emphasized that they wanted their approach to be “strategic”; aligned with the organization’s emerging needs.

They mentioned that a major priority was to bring about culture change and, in particular, a shift away from the “hero leader” stereotype that they saw many of their organization’s senior executives as enacting.

But just what does a strategic approach to leadership development really mean? Could it be that an approach such this organization is pursuing might end up having the effect of largely preserving the status quo? A “strategic” approach to leadership development can quite easily become strategic fallacy.

The other night, what is turning out to be a really interesting book turned up in the mail: the International Leadership Association’s Leadership for Transformation, edited by JoAnn Danelo Barbour and Gill Robinson Hickman.

Flicking through it, I marked several chapters to go back to but one particularly caught my eye, a piece on transformational leadership and power (see full title below) by Laura M. Harrison.

What drew me in to the chapter was some introductory commentary in which Harrison discusses the difference between two classes she teaches, one on organizational theory, the other on leadership.

Have you noticed how the terms leadership and leaders are frequently conflated, taken as equivalent? The two terms tend to be mixed around as if they were largely interchangeable.

Someone might say, “The leadership team is meeting today.” Or they might say, “The leaders are meeting today.”

Even when the terms are not used with such immediately apparent equivalence, there can still be a sense that leadership and leaders are used to describe much the same thing; that leadership is the work of people at the top, who are leaders, and they carry out leadership by virtue of being in their roles.

Distributed leadership is very much a vogue term these days, even though its meaning is somewhat nebulous. A common thread is to enable others to contribute to leadership – however defined – to better help bring about desired organizational results.

But how do you create distributed leadership? In particular, what kinds of actions help to open-up space in which others can demonstrate leadership? Is it best to “stand back” on the expectation that others will come forward? Or is some form of more active intervention more likely to prompt leadership action from others?

I felt annoyed during the week when one contributor to an online discussion described my differentiation of leadership and management as the “familiar one that most people talk about, perhaps with a few tweaks here and there.”

I think what troubled this writer was that I used the term “task” in connection with management, and he read this as me saying that leaders are people- and relationship-oriented while managers are task-oriented.

Welcome to the first post for my Leadership-mode Blog.

My intention is that this becomes a forum for ideas about leadership from a process perspective rather than a leader-centered one.

That is, the focus will be on the work of leadership, acknowledging that both recognized leaders and others can undertake leadership action. Please feel welcome to add your views to the ideas expressed here.

My piece last week on leadership and function attracted an interesting response. This was along the lines that it’s better to think about the function rather than the purpose of leadership, as purpose “smacks of intention and input”. The illustration was offered of people leading by example without any purpose in mind.

Obviously, leadership can be understood in different ways. One of these – not one that I would favor - is that leadership is simply the act of being a leader. Such usage is reflected in, for instance, media reports of a political leader being removed from her position. “She’s lost the leadership,” the headlines might say.