TOP Note: In using this diagram with colleagues, subordinates or clients, it is wise to be fully conversant with the underlying framework of interacting-for-benefit. It is particularly important to be clear about the difference between the Types and the Modes.
The leadership challenge may involve doing no more than perform in the job as specified or required by the situation. Other types of leader often expect someone to be an officer ("it's his job, why doesn't he do it!"), when really the social role they should be inducing is that of «follower».
Leadership entails wielding legitimate authority in a forceful way that demands prompt adequate responses from others. Line-managers often see themselves as bosses, given that they are formally assigned authority to wield power legitimately and be held accountable for performance. However, that is simply one of their leadership roles.
Leadership involves maintaining loyalty to the values of the organization, even when expedience and pressures from co-workers indicate some or many are acting or inclined to act in a contrary fashion. Exactly what action to take will be a function of the level of the post in the organization and the particular situation.
Leadership involves mastery of complexity, which means dispassionate analysis of the system that includes all organizational divisions, the industry, and aspects of wider society. No relevant factor is omitted. Strategic goals of the Coordinator without a strategy are weak.
an ability to display foresight as shown by a track record of successful and unconventional or unexpected predictions,
PLUS
successful implementation of implications of those predictions.
Given that each new situation is different and seems unpredictable, the leader also needs to be able communicate their foresight in a way that is credible, persuasive and genuinely unites people.
Leadership is one of the most abused topics in the management literature. Everyone tries to simplify it. Vast sums of money have disappeared in pointless research. In THEE, leadership appears in many places, simply because it has so many aspects and can be viewed from so many perspectives. See this phenomenon in a Studio exercise.
In this case, recognize that the interacting-for-benefit perspective is being deliberately applied. However, useful and important this application may be, it is most definitely not a final statement of what leadership is about.
There is a tendency to envisage an organization with its «one leader». This is the «great man» school of history. It's bunkum, emerging from infantile fantasies that we all have that there is an omnipotent rescuer. The vast majority of people are or can be leaders within a sphere appropriate to them. Many seemingly «successful stars» of business turn out to be crude performers to the gallery who simply rode a boom in their market, or charismatic confidence men who piled debt on debt until the flame-out.
In practice …
Any large organization has dozens, if not hundreds, of leaders.
Any manager carries multiple leadership roles e.g. the CEO might hold all or most of them, others will hold a few.
At least two of the leadership roles listed are often unfilled: the strategist and the visionary.
Officer: Job-focus
