Superleaders

What makes a Superleader? Several years ago, Warren Bennis, one of the most influential and prolific students of leadership ever, set out to determine what makes a superleader by interviewing 90 top corporate executives, university presidents, public officials, publishers, and winning coaches. His investigation turned up five major qualities.

The first is vision – the capacity to create a clear picture of a goal which inspires people to perform.

The second is communication – the ability to portray the vision in a way that enlists the support of followers.

The third is persistence – the ability to stay the course regardless of obstacles.

The fourth quality Bennis calls “empowerment” – the ability to create a structure that harnesses the energies of others to achieve the desired result.

The fifth is organizational ability – the capacity to measure the performance of a group, to learn from mistakes, and to use the resulting knowledge to enhance effectiveness.

Bennis also found that the most effective leaders did not pay much attention to fads in management theory or get-rich-quick schemes. They were all simply devoted to a vision of excellence and achievement and all very good at transmitting that vision to followers. Finally, Bennis’s superleaders all had a healthy disregard for risk; in other words, they consistently demonstrated courage without flirting with disaster. They put very little energy into protecting themselves against failure and most of their energy into making their visions real.

Next Generation Calls for Collaboration

The Next Generation (NGen) project, funded by American Express and convened by Independent Sector, recently released a report on the major concerns of the 2009-2010 class of NGen Fellows, all aspiring leaders under the age of 40.

In essence, the report concluded that professionals under 40 feel that collaboration across sectors is necessary to solve society’s problems and agree on the most important issues to address, but don't know how to connect with people in other sectors working to solve these problems.

The top issues facing communities, the nation, and the world, they concur, are education, poverty, health, and the environment. Unfortunately, however, NGen Fellows had great difficulty identifying any of their peers who were currently effective at solving those significant social problems. Of the Fellows polled, 1,300 skipped this question altogether, and of the 1,000 who did answer it, the top vote getters were Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, who received just ten and eight votes respectively.

Finally, the Fellows believe that the nonprofit sector is best positioned to take the lead in engaging other sectors (government and for-profit business) to solve comprehensive social problems. They also believe that they need more leadership development, especially for the challenges of collaborating across the sectors.

The report goes on to recommend expanding the traditional definition of a “leader” and to stress the need for collaboration to reach out, find common ground, and build bridges.

Want to know more? Check out the summary yourself at http://buildingmovement.org/pdf/ngen_fellows_09_report.pdf.

To Collaborate or Not?

Here on “Leading Together,” we consistently promote the benefits of cooperation and collaboration over competition and inflexibility.

There are, of course, times when competition is not only appropriate but even necessary, and times when staunch commitment to principle is not only valid but even critical. Virtually all historians and social scientists would agree, however, that citizens of the United States inhabit the most individualistic and most competitive culture in the world, and possibly in the history of the world. In that context, we more often need reminders about the advantages of cooperation, collaboration, and willingness to compromise.

These issues are certainly prominent in the current debate about our national debt and the advisability of raising the debt ceiling to pay the bills we have already incurred. A national poll conducted last week, for example, asked respondents from both of the major political parties to state their preference for compromise in relation to their preference for “sticking to our guns.” It seems that one party is significantly more willing to compromise than the other, and the other is much more committed to “sticking to our guns” regardless of the issue or the problem.

The results indicated – at least as of last week – that one party favored compromise over “sticking to our guns” by 68% to 32%. The other party, meanwhile, favored “sticking to our guns” by 66% to 34%. Taken altogether, the poll’s participants favored cooperation by 53% to 47%. (Since we try to avoid partisan posturing here at “Leading Together,” you will have to figure out for yourself which party is which.)

The poll made no reference to any particular issue or any particular reasons for choosing one strategy over the other. Thus the difference between the two parties in this respect may lie deeper than any issue or any rationale for decision. In turn, the results of this poll may provide no clues to what we should be doing about any of the challenges we face, but it does seem to provide a clue to why we have so much trouble reaching any agreements at all.

Zero-Sum Games

As I prepare this blog for publication, the President of the United States and several House and Senate leaders from both parties are trying to hammer out a deal whereby our nation can avoid defaulting on its debts. According to the most reliable economists and historians, an actual default would be catastrophic in several ways; they also tell us that there is no credible reason for us to be in such a precarious position in the first place. But we are.

The underlying causes for the impasse, it seems, are more about the kind of political games that are being played than any rational insights about spending cuts and taxation. The two sides – that is, the two political parties – are playing a zero-sum game, which means that one party will win and the other will lose. Just as in every sporting event ever played in the history of sport, the number of all the wins is exactly the same as the number of all the losses – hence the zero sum.

A non-zero-sum game, by contrast, leads to a positive outcome for both sides, or what we sometimes call a win-win outcome. Win-win outcomes also benefit people who aren't even playing the game but who are influenced by its outcome. People who study human effectiveness know that we can almost always achieve win-win outcomes as long as nobody is driven by non-rational ideologies or dysfunctional emotions like unjustified fear and anger. (Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, lists “think win-win” as habit number 4.)

In the budget and deficit tangle now engulfing our national politics, it is becoming more and more evident that the larger good of the whole nation seems less important to some of our leaders than the narrow interests of some portions of the nation and certainly less important than victory over the other political party. Some of the beliefs driving the participants are in fact based on no rational evidence; they are really just ideological creeds. And a creed with no rational evidence behind it is really nothing more than an intellectual addition – what I like to call an ideaddiction. More than 30 years ago, John Gardner, one of the most insightful observers of our national life, called this kind of thing “the war of the parts against the whole.”

Non-zero-sum games are what most of us play most of the time. Education is a non-zero-sum game because everyone benefits from an educated population. Business is as well, since a successful business satisfies the needs of customers and clients and supports suppliers and the general community. Businesses cannot endure if they only satisfy their own desires; the function of any business is to provide goods and services for others. (It’s also true, of course, that businesses compete against each other in zero-sum kinds of ways.)

The fact is that groups, cultures, and nations can only survive, let alone flourish, if they play enough non-zero-sum games to create lots of win-win situations. The kind of extremist competition we are now witnessing in our political culture is ultimately destructive every which way, and if there is no progress from the talks going on in Washington right now, the destructive results will start to show up real soon.

Collaborative leadership, of course, attempts to play exclusively non-zero-sum games that lead only to win-win outcomes. Such leadership downplays or skirts the compulsion to compete and to perceive people with different ideas as dangerous or misguided. Leading together takes patience, empathy, and wisdom. That’s why it usually takes a long time to show results. But when results start to show up, they are virtually always durable and satisfying. When people are all in the same boat, it is always better to work together than to fight each other. And in this global community we now inhabit, we are all in the same boat just about all the time.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, so it seems appropriate to blog about the main themes of the Declaration of Independence, signed 235 years ago in Philadelphia. Let’s take a look at the phrase that is probably the most famous phrase in that famous document: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration, claimed that those three items are “inalienable rights” – in other words, rights ordained by God and inherent in every human being, since we are all “created equal.” (We’ll skip the hassle over the reference to “all men” and assume that the phrase really meant “all people.”) Documents internal to the group that helped Jefferson draft the Declaration indicate that “life” and “liberty” were quickly accepted, but that “happiness” required a bit more conversation before it was accepted for the finished document.

One report notes that there was some support for the phrase “life, liberty, and property,” but that apparently seemed too mundane and materialistic. More interestingly, to my mind, is the report that an early draft qualified the term “happiness” as “public happiness.” Apparently the founders of our nation eventually felt that “happiness” was inherently and obviously bound up with the public good and thus there would be no possibility that anyone would misinterpret “happiness” as a simple self-centered preoccupation with personal pleasure, gain, or success at the potential expense of others. In that era of enlightenment thinking, happiness itself was seldom thought of as a selfish or self-centered proposition.

As we look back, perhaps the founders should have been more precise and retained the full phrase, “public happiness.” Philosophers of all persuasions have consistently noted the inseparable and reciprocal nature of freedom and responsibility to the community that provides that freedom. Contemporary psychology is now rehabilitating our notions of “public happiness” in its recognition that authentic happiness is never just a matter of self-aggrandizement, but is intimately bound up with networks of relationships, with one’s place in the community, and with larger visions of meaning and purpose.

Every Fourth of July we should all celebrate and give thanks for the blessings of life, liberty, and opportunities to pursue happiness, but we should also reflect a bit on our responsibilities as citizens.

The Pitfalls of Success

Everybody wants to succeed, to be a success. Yet strangely enough, success can be one of the hardest things of all to deal with – especially for leaders.

Leadership emerges in a group when the group faces a problem, and the worse the problem is, the more group members are willing to give leaders power. On the other hand, if a group is doing just fine, not facing any particular problems, it doesn’t need much leadership. So those who hanker after the power, prestige, and visibility that comes with leadership should recognize that leadership can also be a booby trap.

If a leader is called upon to solve a group’s problem and actually does solve it, then there is no more need for a leader regarding that particular problem. This is one reason why totalitarian or autocratic leaders spend so much time manufacturing crises and telling their followers that terrible problems will ensue if someone else is made their leader. Hitler was a genius at it. This is also the reason why groups are often better off without leaders if they can solve their problems for themselves.

There is really only one way a leader can remain a leader and still compile a consistent record of success and effectiveness, and that is by rolling with fate. Persistence is a good trait in a leader, but stubbornness is not. Winston Churchill may be the 20th Century’s best example of a leader who served brilliantly under one set of circumstances – namely, war – but failed to keep his credibility after his side won the war.

Business leaders and entrepreneurs who succeed time after time do so mostly because they have a knack for responding to or anticipating the fickle demands of the marketplace, not because they have any power to dictate the decisions of consumers. Once a group’s problem is solved, members almost automatically seek new problems and challenges. If leaders don’t want to get run over by their followers, they have to seek new problems and challenges too.

The Business of America

Calvin Coolidge is one of the least quoted America presidents because he was usually reluctant to say much of anything. But one thing he did say has stuck with us. “The Business of America,” said Calvin Coolidge, “is business.” His declaration epitomizes an influential school of thought which claims that business is and should be the dominant American institution. Some have proposed, in fact, that the United States government should be run like a business.

The notion that leadership in all sorts of organizations and enterprises should mimic the behavior of business leadership is rooted in the history of business itself. About 160 years ago, when large-scale formal organizations first began to appear all over the landscape, business organizations had one definite advantage over democratic governments and other multi-purpose organizations. The clear and constant discipline of the bottom line, which separates profit from loss, gave business leaders a target and a method to measure all aspects of performance. The development of management as an academic subject made its initial gains in the world of business. Nowadays management principles are taught to leaders and would-be leaders in education, religion, government, medicine, and dozens of other fields.

In times of economic recession, the pressures of budgets make the application of business methods even more logical. Ironically, the success of business management principles, the affluence produced by American business, and concern for certain side effects like environmental pollution, have given rise in some quarters to a shift in emphasis from production to service and from preoccupation with the bottom line to social responsibility. One of the most promising developments in the realm of organizations, including businesses, is the focus on the "triple bottom line:" people, profits and the planet. If Calvin Coolidge were around today, he might be tempted to revise his most famous remark. “The business of America”, he might say, “is America.”

Two Heads Are Better Than One

Two heads, they say, are better than one, and that’s often true in leadership situations. For one thing, the public pressure of leadership often calls for a loyal colleague or assistant to take care of vital behind the scenes work. For another, the temperamental qualities make for inspirational leadership often conflict with the temperamental qualities that make for effective organization, and the two functions are often best handled by two separate people. Finally, the pressures of task achievement in any group often conflict with the need to maintain good relationships within the group. Very few leaders are good at both.

Every group or organization, from a neighborhood scout troop to a multinational corporation, exists in order to achieve certain goals. At the same time, every group has to maintain workable relationships among its members. In a social club where relationships are most important, a hard-driving leader would be out of place. In a dire emergency when survival is at stake, group members are often willing to submit to hard-driving authoritarian leadership and forget about relationships for the time being. But in between those extremes, where most of the world’s work is done, tasks and relationships are both important and both need attention from leaders. Unfortunately, very few people are outstanding at both task leadership and human relationships. Thus we often find different people specializing in different roles under different conditions. Every now and then exceptional leaders emerge who can handle both the public and private, the inspirational and organizational, and the task and relationship problems of leadership. But we shouldn’t rely on them, for they are rare. In many cases, two heads are better than one.

Failure and the Courage to Risk

What’s so free about free enterprise? We hear an awful lot about business leaders who build successful enterprises, and we love to stress the freedom to succeed that our business system provides. What we often prefer to forget is that a free enterprise system implies the freedom to fail as much as the freedom to succeed. The function of failure and the courage to take risks are keys to effective leadership.

Students of social and organizational effectiveness are quick to stress flexibility, adaptability, and innovation as critical virtues in any organized enterprise. Underlying those virtues is the courage to risk failure in pursuit of worthy goals. In a changing and uncertain world, success can never be guaranteed, and very often the attempt to guarantee security or protection from change and competition will backfire and cause stagnation and rigidity. Where no risks are taken, nothing new is created.

This is why the most successful creators and founders of business empires often achieve success only after a painful string of failures. Thomas Edison, for example, expected his experiments to fail hundreds of times for every time they worked. The trick, of course, is to keep your eye on the goal, to avoid taking failure personally, and to think in long-range terms. It may be true that nothing succeeds like success, but it’s also true that nothing teaches like failure.

Overcoming Handicaps

Over the last few generations, the problems faced by handicapped individuals have received a good deal of long-overdue attention. Overcoming handicaps may in fact be one of the most effective ways of developing extraordinary skills, and we seldom recognize the fact that many of history’s greatest leaders suffered from one handicap or another.

Contemporary psychology has learned that one of the most important developmental events of anyone’s life, particularly in youth, is the experience of overcoming adversity, bad luck, or handicap and prevailing over circumstances. When the handicap is not too severe, the strength and courage it helps generate can produce the potential for leadership. Alexander the Great, an epileptic who dominated much of the world by the age of 21, may be the most dramatic ancient example, and Franklin Roosevelt directing the course of our nation from his wheelchair may be the best modern example.

Until recently, of course, visible handicaps were mostly kept out of the limelight, and FDR went to great lengths to disguise his polio. Nowadays we are learning to deal with the idea of handicaps and to take advantage of whatever human talent may be hidden behind them, or even driven by them – including leadership talent.

Leadership, Change, and Life-Long Learning

Life is unpredictable and change is an iron law of life. Leadership is one of the processes human groups generate in response to change and one of the processes that creates change. But how can leadership be effective if people naturally tend to resist change and if things are changing so rapidly and so profoundly that it’s hard enough just trying to figure out what’s going on?

The frantic pace of change in our technologized, computerized world is one of the most difficult problems facing leaders in all sorts of groups and organizations. How can leaders help their groups solve problems if those problems keep changing from day to day?

Nine or ten generations ago, tradition was as strong a force as change, and people mostly grew up to be whatever their parents had been. Nowadays no generation faces the same problems or circumstances as their parents, and a generation gap seems built in to contemporary history even when the generations get along fairly well.

At the same time, all our social organizations were built to solve yesterday’s problems, not necessarily today’s or tomorrow’s. In our educational institutions, which are supposed to prepare leaders for the future, all we can really hope to teach most of the time are the lessons of the past. Nevertheless, education is still the key to leadership for the future.

Not necessarily just the kind of formal education that takes place in schools during youth, but the kind of education that continues throughout the life cycle. That kind of education is based on curiosity and recognition of problems needing innovative solutions. It’s also based on flexibility of character and a willingness to break old habits and look for new answers to new dilemmas.

When it comes to effective leadership, old dogs have got to keep learning new tricks, or their followers won’t keep following.

Train-the-Trainer Institute for Collaborative Leadership at Ripon College July 5-9, 2011

This week’s blog is a rather shameless promotion for an event sponsored by the Wisconsin Leadership Institute for teachers and youth leaders who want to learn how to facilitate our curriculum on collaborative leadership at the secondary-school level. It will happen on the Ripon College campus in Ripon, Wisconsin, from July 5 through July 9.

The purpose of this five-day Institute is to help facilitators and youth leaders understand the process for facilitating the Wisconsin Leadership Institute’s youth curriculum, as presented in Leading Together: Foundations of Collaborative Leadership, by Laurie Frank, Carol Carlin, and Jack Christ. The Institute will prepare facilitators to offer workshops and programs to train others to use the curriculum. This Institute will be valuable for teachers, youth workers, camp counselors, and those who train people in youth development work. An understanding of adventure education, group facilitation, presentation, and processing of activities is desired.

Facilitators and youth leaders who participate in the Institute will:
· Develop an understanding of the underlying assumptions and concepts of collaborative leadership as presented in Leading Together: Foundations of Collaborative Leadership.
· Become familiar with the scope and sequence of the curriculum.
· Practice the experiential process as outlined in the curriculum.
· Share information with colleagues about collaborative leadership and facilitation techniques.
· Leave with an ability to provide workshops to those who are interested in developing collaborative leadership skills, values, and habits within youth groups and organizations.

To achieve these goals, participants will engage in the process, reflect upon their experience, and dialogue with each other to gain meaning and understanding. Participants will create their own personal action plan for applying the lessons of the Institute and sharing them with others. Completion of the workshop will entitle facilitators to conduct workshops with those who are interested in using the curriculum to its fullest extent. Graduate credits will be available for completion of the Institute.

Overview of the Agenda
Day 1: Introductions, orientation to the history and structure of the curriculum; foundational beliefs; collaborative leadership tasks.
Day 2: What is leadership?
Day 3: What is collaborative leadership?
Day 4: Participant presentations and feedback.
Day 5: Action planning and closing.

For questions about the Leading Together Institute, please call Laurie Frank
at (608) 251-2234 or email her at LSFrank@mac.com

To register for the Institute, please contact Dr. Jack Christ at Christj@ripon.edu

The $480 program fee includes room, board, and meals for the duration of the event. Three graduate credits are available through Viterbo University for an additional cost.

The Drive to Achieve

What motivates people to seek leadership roles? Well, some people who wind up in leadership roles don’t seek them at all but find themselves accepting leadership through accidents of fate or circumstance. Some simply enjoy relationships in groups and like working with followers and peers. Some seek power, prestige, and other forms of ego gratification.

Over the long haul, however, the most effective leaders tend to be motivated by achievement and problem solving.

A number of years ago, a psychologist named David MacClellan did a series of studies which suggest that a very important motive for many people in leadership roles is achievement. Subsequent studies seem to agree that some people simply like to accomplish things and take great satisfaction in setting and achieving goals.

Business leaders and entrepreneurs seem to be particularly driven by achievement motives, even more so than by dreams of wealth or material comfort. The most effective leaders of all, in fact, seem driven not only to solve problems for their group or community but also to seek new problems to solve. Such leaders are particularly effective because they never cease to help their group or community to identify and address the problems confronting them.

Solutions to social problems always contain the seeds of new and different problems, so leaders who rest on their laurels don’t stay leaders very long.

Harmony, Not Unity

In the contentious, partisan environment currently swamping our political culture, we hear plaintive calls for calm, compromise, and unity. Unfortunately, we hear at least as many angry calls for total victory by one side over the other.

The current situation here in Wisconsin offers an instructive look at the main outlines of the problem and may hint at solutions. After weeks of bitter dispute over the new governor’s budget and plans to strip bargaining rights from public union members, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a thoughtful and refreshing column written by two prominent Wisconsin citizens on opposite sides of the dispute.

The column, signed by Kevin Conroy and Jim Connelly, a Democrat and a Republican, concluded that “We need to show individual leadership by calling for a decrease in partisan shouting and by getting directly involved in bipartisan business growth initiatives. One thing is very obvious: We can’t do it divided.”

My only quibble with that column is in the headline: “Wisconsin’s Prosperity Requires Unity.” That headline, of course, was probably written by a headline writer and not by the authors of the column itself. Nonetheless, the issue is worth attention. I would suggest that “unity” is a misleading and elusive goal. I would rather we aim for harmony.

Aiming for unity suggests that we should all agree on most if not all strategies and tactics, which of course also assumes that we agree on goals and objectives. To point a metaphor, people unified on political and economic issues is a lot like a choir singing in unison. Everyone sings the same notes at the same time. That assumes that sopranos can sing bass notes and basses can sing soprano notes.

Harmony, however, requires us to sing different notes in a coordinated effort, as long as we agree to sing the same song in the same key at the same tempo. The concept of harmony respects the integrity of each section – bass, tenor, alto, soprano – in the service of richer, more complex, and ultimately more satisfying music.

Aiming for unity asks us to choose one of the following alternatives: ask or force the other side to give up its integrity, surrender integrity for the sake of unity, or concoct a compromise which both sides can support. The more deeply each side is committed to its own principles, the less likely they are to settle for any of these alternatives.

Aiming for harmony starts with the simple act of listening to the other side and choosing to get to know people on the other side in all their complex humanity. Aiming for harmony asks us to quit demonizing the people on the other side and to quit distorting their arguments. It requires some measure of empathy, the driving force of all moral and ethical behavior. It requires us to look for verifiable information and to quit spouting unverifiable ideology. It is worth noting, by the way, that all ideology is unverifiable. That’s what makes it ideology rather than information, knowledge, or wisdom.

Collaborative leadership always starts with relationship building and agreement on basic principles like democratic process and empirical evidence, which can take a long time. It is, however, worth the effort, since it promotes harmony – coordinated action in pursuit of shared goals while maintaining the integrity of the participants. It helps us avoid the toxic and fruitless condition of “us versus them” and it helps us remember that our political adversaries are also our neighbors and fellow citizens.

What Is Leadership?

The English language has included the word “leader” for a very long time. But the word “leadership” didn’t make it into the dictionary until around the year 1800. The new word reflected the emergence of a new approach to human organization and governance: democracy. Since then all sorts of definitions of leadership have cropped up – some good, some less good, and some downright silly.

Back in the nineteen sixties, a scholar at the Ohio State University program in leadership studies set out to categorize all the supposedly scientific definitions of the term “leadership” that he could find. He found about 130 different kinds of definitions. That’s not 130 different definitions, it’s 130 different kinds of definitions. Some focused on the traits of leaders, some on the power of leaders, and some on the roles and responsibilities that leaders share. One social scientist had the audacity to claim that leadership is whatever social scientists say it is.

I like to define leadership as a reciprocal process of mobilizing resources and motivating individuals in pursuit of goals shared by leaders and followers alike. My emphasis is on reciprocity between leaders and followers and on shared goals. But I must say I am partial to some of the more interesting statements made by people who have lived with the realities of leadership in important places. Harry Truman’s summation is one of my favorites. Truman said that a leader is a person who gets other people to do what they don’t want to do and like it. But probably the most quoted description of leadership isn’t a definition at all, but a paradoxical statement by an ancient Oriental philosopher and politician named Lao Tsu. The best of all leaders, he said, is the one who helps people so that, eventually, they don’t need him. Then comes the one they love and admire. Then comes the one they fear. The worst is the one who lets people push him around. Where there is no trust, he said, people will act in bad faith. The best leader doesn’t say much, but what he says carries weight. When he is finished with his work, the people say “we did it ourselves.”

Lao’s ideal leader sounds a bit like Harry Truman’s.

The Power of Persistence

Some people are never satisfied unless they’re starting something new. Some people refuse to give up no matter how many times they seem to be down for the count. Some people just don’t take no for an answer. Such a man was Captain David P. Mapes, principal founder of the city in which I live – Ripon, Wisconsin.

After founding the city of Carbondale in Pennsylvania, David Mapes moved on to New York City, where he operated a commercial steamboat and took to calling himself Captain. Before long, his steamboat and worldly fortune sank in New York’s East River.

Undaunted, Mapes packed up and headed west. He didn’t stop until he reached the Valley of Ceresco, ninety miles north of Milwaukee, where a band of utopian socialists led by a visionary named Warren Chase had founded a community the called the Wisconsin Phalanx. Mapes struck a deal with the largest landowner in the area, former Acting Governor of the Michigan Territory John Scott Horner, to sell plots of land to settlers in a brand-new city. They named their city Ripon, after the English cathedral town which was Horner’s ancestral home. Mapes’s primary method of attracting settlers was to flag down passing wagons heading westward and talk up the virtues and advantages of living in Ripon. He was a crackerjack promoter who seldom took no for an answer.

For about two years, a rivalry flourished between Chase, the founder of the Ceresco Commune, and Mapes, the founder of Ripon over the future of their adjacent communities. As the commune faltered around 1850, however, the pioneer spirit of competition gave way to the pioneer spirit of cooperation, and Ceresco was eventually absorbed by Ripon. Mapes soon laid plans to attract responsible settlers by building a college on Ripon’s highest hill. Originally named Brockway College after a man who donated the largest founding gift ($250), the school eventually took its name from the city it lived in – Ripon College. Thus within four years of losing everything he owned, Captain David Mapes had founded a city and a college that have lasted for more than 160 years.

Goals and Goal Setting

If you’ve ever been to a management seminar, you probably heard a great deal about goals and goal-setting. It is certainly true that goal-setting is a crucial activity in any leadership role. If you don’t know where you want to go, you’re likely to wind up somewhere else. Goals serve several different functions for individuals and groups.

A goal is a desired future state. Human beings are, under healthy conditions, naturally goal-oriented, which means that every time a healthy person achieves a goal, he or she normally looks around for a new goal or a new challenge. The first and most general function of goals is to orient behavior in a particular direction. In a group, goals provide legitimacy and group spirit to the extent that all members agree upon and collaborate on the same goals. By orienting behavior in a particular direction, goals provide motivation, since people are more likely to work on targets they can see or imagine. For motivational purposes, leaders should try to make sure that the goals they set are neither too high nor too low – they should be challenging but within reach. Finally, goals serve as measuring rods for performance. They help us determine how well we’re doing or how much progress we’ve made in a given amount of time. In general, purposelessness is one of the hardest things for people to endure, and purpose in life is mostly a matter of setting and achieving goals.

Natural-born Leaders?

Are leaders made or born or both or neither? Are some people destined for leadership while others are destined for followership and still others doomed to watch from the sidelines? Our ideas about these questions have changed over the years.

The study of leadership behavior really got rolling around World War I when psychologists hired by the military set out to discover ways to measure leadership ability so potential military leaders could be singled out and developed. Unfortunately, try as they might, the psychologists could never prove much about the traits they thought leaders should possess. They figured leaders should be intelligent, but then they discovered that real geniuses have trouble in leadership roles because followers can’t understand them. They figured a strong sense of initiative would be useful, but then they discovered that too much initiative resulted in a tendency to do things alone and leave followers behind to fend for themselves.

To make a long and frustrating story short, the attempt to study leadership by studying individual character traits was eventually abandoned. The more recent and more practical approach is to study the functions or roles of leadership – such as motivating, communicating, making decisions, organizing tasks, and setting standards. Some people are good at some leadership roles but not others, so the best leader for any particular job depends on the situation, the task at hand, the way the group is organized, the kinds of followers involved, and the nature of the surrounding environment.

Talents are inborn, but skills have to be learned and developed. A successful senator may be a lousy corporation president and vice versa. A born leader in one situation may turn to be a born loser in another.

Democracy in Egypt

Yesterday a bottom-up movement for democracy in Egypt claimed victory over the regime of Hosni Mubarak, who came to power immediately after the assassination of Anwar Sadat and never relinquished the state of martial law under which he ruled for 30 years. Thus one of the world’s oldest civilizations is now poised to enter the circle of modern democracy. Let’s hope Egyptians can create a democratic government as effectively as they toppled Mubarak.

As sudden and surprising as this event seems, it is really part of a protracted revolution that has been sweeping the globe for more than two centuries. After two or three centuries of intellectual ferment, the American Revolution and the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century really got the democratic ball rolling. Since then dozens of nations have moved from aristocratic and dictatorial regimes to democratic forms of governance.

The connection between this large-scale historical trend and the practice of collaborative leadership is manifest. The word “leadership” itself did not exist in our language until the era of the democratic revolutions. It emerged because we needed a new word and a new language to describe a new thing in the world: a system of governance that required, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “the consent of the governed.”

Modern democracies can only exist in a modern world where most people are reasonably well educated, reasonably well informed, and willing to act freely up to the point where their freedom interferes with the freedom of others. All real leadership is inherently democratic, since leaders and followers work together for shared goals. If the goals of the so-called leader conflict with the goals of so-called followers, then the process is really about naked power and dictatorship, not leadership. If that process goes on too long, so-called followers will become revolutionaries and so-called leaders will become ex-dictators just like Hosni Mubarak.

We can consider collaborative leadership to be hyperdemocratic because it doubles down on the concept of shared goals and collaborative behavior. Collaborative leadership generally takes a long time to develop because it depends so heavily on established relationships, which must precede any attempt to achieve specific goals. But when those relationships take root, collaborative leadership can work its magic very quickly, as we witnessed in the case of Egypt and Mr. Mubarak. Egyptians formed bonds of empathy with each other as they struggled for years under bonds of oppression. But when the opportunity to overthrow the oppressor emerged, they were able to organize and claim victory in just a few weeks.

John Hancock's John Hancock

Leadership generally begins by attracting attention. This week we celebrate the birthday of a man whose flair for calling attention to himself is immortalized on our Declaration of Independence. John Hancock, who drew the first signature on the Declaration so big, he said, that the King of England could read it without his glasses, is our subject this week. Ever since then, people often refer to any signature on any document as their "John Hancock."

John Hancock’s father died when John was just a boy, and he was adopted by his uncle, the wealthiest merchant in Boston. After graduating from Harvard and taking over his uncle’s business, Hancock began using his influence for political purposes. In 1768, the crew of a Hancock ship locked the British customs official in the ship’s hold and unloaded the cargo without paying duties. From that point, the British considered Hancock a dangerous man and American patriots considered him a leader.

In the 1770s, he worked with Sam Adams for American independence, and on the night of Paul Revere’s famous ride the British were hoping to find and arrest John Hancock first and foremost. He served as president of the Continental Congress from 1775 to 1777 and as the first governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The only job he really wanted but didn’t get was commander of the revolutionary armies. That job, of course, went to an even greater leader – George Washington.

Celebrating Ben Franklin, All-Purpose Leader

Who’s your choice for the greatest all-around American leader? One of my top choices was born 305 years ago this month. He was never elected to a high office, yet his impact on American life was as profound and far-reaching as anyone could ever claim. On January 17, 1706, Benjamin Franklin came into the world he was to change in many ways.
If you were to ask people who the greatest American leaders have been, many would automatically respond with the names of presidents like Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and George Washington. Presidents are, after all, expected to provide leadership on many fronts. But they can’t provide effective leadership in a democratic context unless other leaders outside the political arena are doing their jobs well. Leaders in business, labor, education, religion, social affairs, diplomacy, and a host of other fields are crucial to the performance of society as a whole. And nobody I know of has influenced so many different areas of American life as Benjamin Franklin.
Almost every time he encountered a significant problem, he invented a solution and organized a human institution to deal with it. Printer, writer, scientist, inventor, social organizer, statesman, philanthropist, public servant, moralist, humorist, and diplomat, Franklin put his stamp on the American character in ways that still endure. Given his wide-ranging interest, he may have been more effective as a private citizen than he ever could have been as a president. Happy 305th birthday Ben, and thanks a lot.

The Power of Words

In our previous blog we mentioned the potential of overly critical or nasty speech to encourage destructive behavior. This time we’ll reference the power of language to inspire and galvanize creative and productive behavior. This month, in fact, marks the anniversaries of two memorable statements of purpose and meaning in the human community.

News and information media have amply reported on the fiftieth anniversary of John Kennedy’s inaugural address, which gave us several stirring calls to positive action. Of the two most famous lines in that address, the first was a statement of commitment: “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe.”

The second was a call to service: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Kennedy not only challenged Americans to serve their community, he also created a mechanism to channel that service through the Peace Corps, to which thousands of Americans have devoted themselves.

This month also marks the seventieth anniversary of an address delivered in an even more global context. On January 6, 1941, when Franklin Roosevelt delivered his annual address to the Congress, most of the world’s major powers were already at war, but the United States was still technically neutral. Nevertheless, FDR spelled out for Congress and the world a statement of the four basic freedoms which he felt should serve as a solid foundation for a peaceful world. Those four freedoms ultimately became the basis of the Allied nations’ battle against fascism.

The most often quoted passage from that address goes like this:

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world. The second is the freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want – which translated into world terms means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants – everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear – which translated into world terms means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor – anywhere in the world.

Those four freedoms are still the most appropriate and most durable basis for a peaceful world order. Unfortunately, they are still out of reach for millions of people in dozens of nations. Nonetheless, it behooves citizens of the world’s leading nations to keep the spirit of FDR’s address alive.

The Courage to Learn

This week’s biggest news story happened at a Tucson shopping mall, where a disturbed young man went on a rampage with an automatic weapon that left six dead and fourteen injured. His primary target was Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who seems to be recovering miraculously from a bullet hole in her brain. Among the dead is nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green, who was attending the event to learn about how the democratic process works.

As a community, we have witnessed so many of these violent episodes that the range of responses has become predictable. The resulting public conversation, in fact, has focused largely on who is supposedly to blame for this catastrophe and others like it. Among political partisans and some quarters of mass media, the talk has often been polarized, defensive, and accusatory.

Part of the problem, I think, is that too many people, especially those with a political or religious ideology to defend and promote, assume that cause and effect in human affairs can be reduced to simple one-cause-fits-all solutions. We are told that the horror in Tucson could have been prevented by more civility in our political discourse, by stricter limits on guns that are only good for killing lots of people in a few seconds, by reducing the amount of violence in mass media and entertainment, or by better monitoring of people with mental-health problems.

Some even argue that the best solution is to make sure that even more people have guns at the ready for self-defense. That argument may seem useful and personally satisfying after the fact, but it is not a prescription for prevention.

The fact is that people never do anything significant for just one reason. Causation in human affairs is always a matter of multiple causes. In cases like this, communities are a lot like gardens. Just as a garden’s growth requires healthy seeds, receptive soil, ample sunshine and water, perhaps some appropriate fertilizer, and attentive weeding, healthy communities must pay attention to all the factors that contribute to ultimate causation. If any one factor is weak or missing, the garden will suffer or die; if all the factors are just little bit deficient, the garden will still suffer and might not survive.

There is plenty of valid and reliable evidence that nasty, toxic rhetoric contributes to the tendency among a small fraction of the population to act out violently. In fact, the very presence of violence in any culture at any level, whether in real life or in the imaginative life of entertainment media and computer games, tends to generate copycat behavior among the small fraction of the population that just might act out the violence their eyes and ears and brains have absorbed. The process of desensitization to violence has been documented over and over again in many experimental and real-life contexts.

And it’s sheer common sense to realize that the ready availability of high-tech handguns makes it more likely that disturbed people will occasionally use them for their intended purpose.

Thus there is very good reason to ask our political representatives and our entertainment moguls to tone down the violence and the polarized nastiness that have been polluting our culture for some time now. We know that Old Testament episodes and Shakespeare’s plays are violent in places, but we are supposed to think about the reasons for and the consequences of such violence in the Bible and in Shakespeare. And nobody spends hours every day reading the Old Testament or Shakespeare.

The violence we see on television, however, is pervasive, graphic, and spectacular. It happens for no reason other than cheap entertainment, and many people watch it for hours every day. The nasty, polarized rhetoric to which we are subjected in our political life is never really intended to solve any significant problem, but just to work people up to attack or defend an ideology. And ideologies are not based on empirical evidence but on faith in some tradition or some authority; thus, when ideologies clash, there can never be a rational conversation with a satisfying conclusion. There can only be more and more rounds of pointless clash.

There is also good reason to expect our elected officials to take seriously the impact of guns in our culture. This would mean facing up to the unwarranted power of the gun lobby and looking carefully at all the available evidence on all the issues involved, including evidence from other nations where gun violence is a non-issue.

So what to do? The basic principles of collaborative leadership on which the Collaborative Leadership Network is founded can be very helpful here. One important principle is to recognize that the truth is often complex, and in human affairs it is always very complex.

Thus we should try to be patient and track down all the causes for a given problem before we propose solutions or take action. This means recognizing that we can only reduce the incidence of mass killing by addressing all the significant causes at once – in this case, by supporting civility in public discourse, by sensible limits on the kinds of guns that are only useful for killing people, by acknowledging the dangers of violence in mass media, by more effective monitoring and treatment of people with certifiable violent tendencies, and by whatever other means seem appropriate.

We should also be patient about turning prescriptions into actual solutions. In our instant-gratification quick-fix culture, patience is an often-neglected virtue. Legislation is not always the answer to large-scale social problems, but sometimes it is. And getting legislation passed can be a long, tedious process. In any case, for it to succeed, it should also be a collaborative process.

The first principle of effective collaboration, in fact, is that collaboration starts with relationships. Collaborative leaders spend a lot of time and energy building bridges, knocking down walls, and generally developing relationships with others, including those who seriously disagree with them, before they even think about achieving any particular goals together. This can be time-consuming and draining, but it ultimately works better than the old worn-out power games that depend on hierarchy, authority, intimidation, and competition.

Those who promote collaboration and collaborative leadership are frequently ridiculed by others for being idealistic, naïve, weak, or simply out of touch with the supposed realities of human interaction. Over the last two millennia, however, we have learned that collaboration based on concern for others actually works better than competition in many situations. Our wisest and most respected leaders, philosophers, and moral prophets have all said so. Of course, many of them have been assassinated or crucified as dangerous revolutionaries. Apparently, living out the lessons they taught takes considerable courage.

It may sound idealistic and naïve to claim that our first challenge is simply to get along with each other, but our wisest and most profound observers have been delivering pretty much that very message since well before the Sermon on the Mount, and contemporary psychology echoes much of that message.

It’s time we mustered the courage and the wisdom to take that message seriously.

Bureaucracy Pro and Con

The quality of leadership in any group depends an awful lot on the size and structure of the group itself. There's one kind of group, in fact, that almost seems to defy any attempt at creative leadership, and you'll hear people in government, business, education, and virtually everywhere else complain about it. It's the large, formal organization tangled in rules, regulation, and red tape. We usually call it bureaucracy

Bureaucracy is really just a fancy name for an organization so large and so specialized that it can only operate by maintaining clearly defined roles and written rules to govern all activities. The modern world does much of its work through such organizations, and without them many of the material benefits of life would be impossible. Yet they do present serious obstacles to leadership and creative innovation.

Ironically, bureaucracies have contributed to a more rapid pace of change in the modern world, but they are so large and cumbersome that they don't adapt well to change themselves. Also ironically, bureaucracies are the result of the human ability to communicate and store information in writing and other symbolic forms -- yet they also limit communication by eliminating much of the face-to-face interaction which helps people to really understand each other.

Since people can easily be treated as replaceable parts in a large bureaucracy, it can also be hard to motivate them to perform beyond minimal expectations or to take risks beyond the written rules and regulations. One of the most effective ways to make bureaucracies more responsive is to work on building small, effective teams within the organization and give each team a clear set of goals and expectations.

Individuals can't do much alone and massive bureaucracies tend to strangle in their own red tape, but small, close-knit teams communicating directly and personally can be creative and can act as flexible links between individuals and the organization as a whole. Small teams can also support a culture of collaboration between and among individuals, other teams, and the organization as a whole.