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.

Harrison explains how, in the org theory class, she and her class members explore concepts and applications of systems theory in dealing with societal and organizational problems, such as accompanied Cyclone Katrina. She says the students are receptive to these ideas and can see real-world applications.

She contrasts this with her experience in teaching transformational leadership where students find examples such as Martin Luther King Jr. inspiring but remote from their realities. (She later discusses the importance of, and ideas for, including considerations of power in classes on transformational leadership – more about this shortly.)

The apparent disconnect in teaching between the fields of organizational studies and leadership studies struck an immediate chord with me, as one with an academic background in the related field of organizational behavior and now working in the leadership arena.

In organizational studies, the focus tends to be on the collective, whether the organization as a system (or as part of a wider system), or on action within and between groups. Anything that smacks of individual agency is often treated with suspicion or disdain. In leadership studies the opposite is true, with a primary – and often (to me at least) almost overwhelming focus on the individual leader.

Reflecting these traditional academic boundaries, we end up with a focus on the one hand on the collective aspects of organization, and on the other, on the leader. There’s a gap in the middle. There’s very little attention given to individual agency in the context of dealing with issues from a systems perspective. By this I mean that not much attention tends to be given to the nature of leadership interventions by individuals – as opposed to focusing on the person or role of the leader – in dealing holistically with issues. This raises some interesting implications which I’ll return to in a moment.

Back to Laura Harrison’s paper: she makes the point that transformational leadership is often presented as being little more than establishing a vision. But visions exist in a context of power relations and these relations are rarely named and talked about. Students, such as those in Harrison’s classes, have an intuitive sense that transformational leadership, to the extent that it is enacted, tends to be the province of those at the top. In the organizations in which they work, transformational leadership seems well away from what they see themselves as being able to do.

How to bring transformational leadership within reach of students? This is a key question that Harrison identifies. She proposes a number of frameworks to help students understand power dynamics and how they can act productively in settings where power is being exercised. One such framework, for instance, is Meyerson’s concept of “tempered radicals,” which I understand as referring basically to people who stretch the envelope but also have an eye to personal survival.

Harrison says “students need tools that shift the emphasis from an almost obsessive focus on individual leaders to the systems of power themselves as loci for transformational leadership.”

I agree wholeheartedly – but I’d like to push the argument a little further – and this goes back to the gap between the collective orientation of organizational studies and the individualist focus of leadership studies.

Students – and others – need tools that help them see themselves as capable of agency in contexts where systemic factors are at play. Part of this is about understanding system dynamics. But equally important is being able to regard oneself as an actor in an organizational system – maybe an actor with little scope to exercise power, but an actor nonetheless.

Rather than framing transformational leadership as only to do with remote leaders at the top setting an organizational vision, a challenge is to reframe transformation as a matter of achieving change with contentious – messy, thorny – issues, which can arise at any level of an organization.

People up and down the ranks can potentially exercise – or at least contribute to – transformational leadership when framed in this way, even when they have little formal power (authority). How?

A key is to bring power to the moment. Instead of just feeling oppressed and disempowered by “the system” (and such reactions are perfectly understandable in many organizational contexts), a key is to recognize – and talk  about – one’s place as part of the system, even if on the receiving end of distasteful power dynamics.

A challenge is to make discussable what is occurring in the present moment in the context of dealing with particular issues. Rather than finger-pointing or complaining about problems elsewhere, we need to be able to describe, non-judgmentally what is occurring at present for oneself as a participant in the system, and to contemplate what might be going on for others.

Vision-building remains important – and being alert to one’s purposes is vital. But here we are talking not about a CEO crafting a vision, but about people throughout an organization building visions and clarifying purpose in the context of seeking to make headway with particular contentious issues.

Power is about interests. If we want to make interests discussable we need to find ways to verbalize our own interests and to inquire into the interests of those we are dealing with.

Unless we want to bring on WW3, it’s likely to be a good move to contemplate what might be important to those others – and to work from an assumption that they are capable, at least in the present context, of acting reasonably.

The challenge is to be in the moment; in effect, to be mindfully aware of power dynamics as they are playing out at that point. And that implies being alert to – but not consumed by – the risks and opportunities in the situation, and able to act accordingly.

Working in this way is by no means easy, for students or anyone else. But this approach perhaps offers another means to bring leadership as transformation more within the reach of students – along with use of the methods that Harrison so thoughtfully describes.

Harrison, Laura M. 2011 “Using Critical Pedagogy to Critique Power Issues in Transformational Leadership,” chapter in Leadership for Transformation, Eds. JoAnn Danelo Barbour and Gill Robinson Hickman, a volume in the International Leadership Series Building Leadership Bridges, International Leadership Association and Jossey-Bass.