The young chief executive began with a question. ‘I have been thinking about your point,’ he said, ‘that there are no short cuts, no easy solutions to becoming an inspiring leader. Are you trying to tell me in a gentle way that it is quite impossible – if you are not a born leader it is too late?’
‘Not impossible,’ I countered, ‘but it is not easy. Otherwise I suppose a lot more managers today would be good leaders. Perhaps we all inspire others once or twice in our careers. But inspiring others is a bit like getting a hole-in-one at golf: doing it once is just a lucky fluke, and many players pull it off once in their golfing career, but to come near to doing it all the time suggests that you have mastered the art of golf.’
‘Are you saying that learning to inspire others can be compared to learning to excel at the game of golf?’ asked the young chief executive, in some surprise.
‘It’s only a very rough analogy,’ I replied. ‘Yet golf and leadership have in common the fact that there are basic principles underlying both arts. The picture of white golf balls flying high and true onto the green and trickling down the hole reminds me of a better analogy for leadership.’
‘What’s that?’
‘What do you think it is that makes flight possible?’
‘Being an engineer by background I ought to know the answer to your question,’ said the young chief executive with a smile. ‘It is, of course, the Laws of Aerodynamics.’ He paused while I waited, and then continued. ‘You are not going to ask me what they are, are you? If so, I shall really have to dredge down deep into my memory of what we studied in applied mechanics at university.’
‘It may be worth your while,’ I said. ‘For possibly there are equivalents to the Laws of Aerodynamics in the leadership field. If so, under- standing them may enable you, as the chief pilot, to get the jumbo jet of a large organization airborne. Incidentally, pilot comes from the Greek word for a steering oar: the person qualified to steer the craft – the leader.’
‘But everyone knows that leadership is an art, and by talking about possible equivalents to the Laws of Aerodynamics you are beginning to make it sound like a science,’ protested the young chief executive. ‘For a subject to be a science you do indeed need well-established laws or principles, together with theories tested by properly conducted experiments.
‘When I was doing an MBA we had a module on Leadership,’ he continued. ‘I vaguely remember numerous so-called theories about leadership – Fiedler’s Contingency Theory, Hersey and Blanchard’s Situational Leadership, Blake’s Grid, Emotional Intelligence, to name the ones I remember. “Leadership is the most studied subject in the world and the least understood”, one lecturer quoted at us. We were told that none of these theories was proven or conclusive, just ideas. Some claimed to be based on empirical experiments, but the samples were so small and culture bound that it was impossible to take them seriously. As there was no agreement, the lecturer said that he would teach all the theories and let us make what we could of them.’
‘How did you find that?’
‘Extremely confusing.’
‘So would I have done,’ I said, ‘but I think the confusion was needless. For over the past 50 years I think we have made real strides in establishing a knowledge base in leadership – what ought to be taught on, say, an MBA programme even if, owing to a shortfall in the knowledge of the staff, it isn’t actually taught.
‘The starting point is what I regard as the basic question in the leadership field:
Why is it that one person emerges and is accepted as a leader in a group rather than anyone else?
‘At least to my satisfaction,’ I continued, ‘it has now been clearly established that there are three broad ways of answering that core question. They can be compared to paths or approaches that snake their way up a mountain from different directions. The summit of the mountain – the pure essence of leadership – is, as it were, shrouded in mist. For leadership, like all other forms of personal relations, will always have about it a dimension of mystery.’
‘What do you mean by leadership being mysterious? I hadn’t thought about it that way before.’
‘Simply that it contains elements that arouse one’s wonder, stimulate one’s curiosity, and baffle one’s efforts to explain it.’
‘Sounds rather like the Universe,’ he said. ‘But that’s just a challenge to us to find and follow clues and to interpret evidence in order to find a satisfying explanation.’
‘True, but you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We should be willing to stand on the shoulders of those who have studied the subject before us. The three paths I mentioned are well-trodden, clearly visible and from an aerial viewpoint you will see that they converge as they near the cloud-topped summit. In other words, they are complementary. The three signposts are:
QUALITIES – what you are;
SITUATIONAL – what you know;
FUNCTIONAL – what you do.’
‘That all rings bells,’ said the young chief executive, ‘I am sure I have come across those three approaches before. What is the latest thinking about them?’