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.

The 2011 International Leadership Association conference (to be held in London between October 26 and 29) has as its theme: “One Planet, Many Worlds: Remapping the Purposes of Leadership”.

The conference Call for Proposals includes the following observation: “We may all be living in very different worlds, in terms of our belief systems, our priorities, our personal and political choices. But the basic fact that we share one gorgeous but bounded planet means that we cannot possibly continue with 'business as usual'.”

This notion of the purposes of leadership to me is a critical one. Too often, leadership frameworks and models seem to be designs in search of a purpose. What they are seeking to achieve is implicit rather than implicit.

What then do we need leadership to bring about? Why do we need leadership – however we might understand it – at all?

Just as there are many ways of conceiving of leadership, there will presumably be a variety of ways in which its purposes can be defined.

One of the more obvious definitions might be “to align people around organizational goals”. While superficially appealing, such a definition is problematic. For one thing, it suggests that the only questions for which leadership is relevant are those concerning future directions for organizations. This helps bind leadership to where it has traditionally resided; in top executive and formal authority roles.

I prefer to think of the purpose of leadership as to do with making sense of, and enabling action on, contentious issues – those messy problems that are viewed differently by interested parties.

Contentious issues can occur anywhere – whether in the CEO suite or out in the operational areas of an organization; or outside organizations altogether, in community or group – or intergroup – settings anywhere on the planet.

There’s another problem with the traditional leadership definition of aligning people toward organizational goals, and it’s to do with the term alignment. This tends to imply the individual leader out front, communicating the vision so as to motivate and inspire "followers" toward it.

But what if the so-called followers have reservations or other knowledge or perspectives that they are not revealing? What if they are going along with the leader’s vision without being very committed to it? There’s no way within traditional conceptions of leadership for the leader to test the extent of commitment rather than compliance.

Here’s my framing of the purpose of leadership: to establish shared understandings about current realities and preferred futures in relation to a contentious issue, and thereby to enable the release of energy for change.

This implies recognizing that multiple perspectives are needed to make sense of contentious issues; that leaders (formal and otherwise) can never have a monopoly on relevant knowledge; that leaders bring their own beliefs, values, and assumptions to issues; that making sense of issues must be regarded as an essentially tricky enterprise; and that motivation can be internally generated through involvement in good processes - it's not only something drummed up by a leader.

Such an approach implies a shift in thinking away from uncritically defining leadership in terms of leaders and toward considering leadership as about processes of intervention with contentious issues.  (In my book, In the Leadership Mode, I use the term “learning–centered leadership” to describe this form.)

I’ll talk more about this approach to leadership in later posts. In the meantime, I’d like to hear your definition of the purpose of leadership.