What kind of leader are you? I recently chaired a search committee for an administrative position and it was one of the things we asked candidates—for obvious reasons. Really, what committees want to know with this question is, How will you motivate people, manage them, get them to do stuff? Nearly every candidate used the word ‘collaborative.’ I hear that word used so often these days, thrown around in meetings and casual conversation, that it has become a cliché. So I set out to do a little reading on leadership styles to see where ‘collaborative’ came from, what it meant, and what it meant for me as a leader, if anything.
True confession: I often participate in higher ed leadership seminars, programs, sessions at conferences. I read leadership books and essays in the Chronicle etc. I think it’s interesting and important because there’s no such thing as ‘born leader.’ Don’t @ me.
Some common leadership styles and their definitions:
Command and Control. Authoritative, top-down approach associated with the military. One site noted that the post war period saw the movement of hundreds of veterans into positions of leadership in US corporations. They applied the command style, which remains dominant in many industries and bureaucracies, including higher ed. Privilege and power are vested in a few people, who rely on subordinates to carry out their decisions.
Situational. Promotes different leadership styles for different situations and so is task relevant. Seems kind of willy-nilly, amirite? A free for all? Actually, there is a more precise definition based on the work of Blanchard and Hersey in the late ’60s. They posited four sub styles or approaches to leadership that map to four different categories of maturity that purportedly characterize workers/employees. Maturity here means their competence and commitment. Daniel Goleman added two more substyles to make six. One is coaching, for the person who lacks confidence. But in some situations, the leader must be authoritative, as with a person who needs control and direction for simple tasks.
Transformational. The leader uses a sense of purpose, vision, excitement to challenge and inspire; harnesses individuals’ abilities to build a team. This style is characterized by great energy and a willingness to take risks. Such leaders are charismatic and excellent communicators because they have to be to inspire.
Servant leadership. In this mode, the person supposedly at the top is figuratively at the bottom. The leader puts the needs of the people in the organization first, is committed to sharing power broadly so everyone performs as highly as possible. Empathetic, listening, stewarding—these words are associated with servant leaders. Developed by Robert Greenleaf, it is rooted in non-western philosophies. Akin to participatory leadership or democratic leadership styles.
There are other styles out there, to be sure, but collaborative leadership seems to me to blend aspects of transformational and servant leadership. The collaborative style entails the leader building a cohesive team, encouraging the members’ input into decision making and problem solving, and providing the time and resources they need to develop their own expertise, regardless of job title. The leader is a key part of the team in this model, providing not only vision and direction, but support.
I’ve grown partial to the idea of the leader as host. It comes from Meg Wheatley and Debbie Frieze, who wrote Leadership in an Age of Complexity, as well as several short essays. For them, the problems of today are too complex for us to keep believing in ‘heroes,’ that is, commander-leaders who will fix things for us and tell us what to do. We need host leaders, they contend, that is, people who invite others to come together, who create spaces where individuals can share info and co-create solutions. Unlike autocratic command-and-control leaders, hosts know they don’t have all the answers (they don’t even have all the info!), so they invite participation broadly, ignoring the org charts that confine people to narrow roles and limit info flows. Above all, hosts trust other people’s creativity and competence to get the work done. This set of behaviors sounds a lot like what is called collaborative leadership.
Wheatley offers even more insights in an earlier book, Leadership and the New Science (1996). A leader, she says, is the person responsible for developing “the clear identity that lights the dark moments of confusion.” p131. She means that leaders are the people who provide clarity about the purpose and direction of the organization. They highlight shared values, especially core values, and counsel “with a generous spirit” when people slip, when their behaviors don’t reflect the values. Leaders know that people aren’t controllable; rather, they are motivated by concepts that invite their participation.
Leadership and the New Science was and still is a radical departure from the standard leadership books. It was a call to end the command and control style that still dominates US businesses, organizations, and bureaucracies. More specifically, it argues that that style of leadership has to go because it reflects a Newtonian mindset, a western way of thinking and acting that derives from outdated, 17th century science.
It’s an insightful book and there are many good reviews already out there. Suffice it to say here that, under the old science, the universe was a closed system, a machine set in motion by a rational, predictable, clock maker deity who set up rules and then left the shop, leaving the device, a mechanistic world, to run by itself. Importantly, this Newtonian worldview focused on understanding and maintaining the parts, for each piece of the machine had its own distinctive, isolated purpose. In each mechanistic system (and the mechanistic model applied to all manner of expressions, including businesses and governments), equilibrium was the ideal state, so that people viewed order in opposition to disorder or chaos, stasis opposed to change, and control versus anarchy. But the old Newtonian, mechanistic models of the universe no longer apply. To Wheatley, the new science of chaos theory, fractals, and quantum physics has revealed that fluctuation and change are normal in nature, not to be feared or averted. In fact, in nature, chaos is a essential stage of growth that leads to a new, different kind of order. This is why a Newtonian-derived, authoritarian leadership style is a hindrance to modern organizations (including universities). Modern leaders must be flexible, adaptable, and open to change, not resistant. Organizations aren’t machines after all; they are made up of people, and people are like other elements of Nature. Although she doesn’t label the new style of leadership exactly, she does define the kinds of traits needed: awareness, patience, and generosity of spirit.
Wheatley spends a lot of time unpacking why so many people fear change, and I found these insights especially relevant for highered. One reason, for example, is lack of basic information. In many hierarchical organizations, executive leaders purposefully withhold information in order to limit damage, but in the end this strategy means employees can’t participate in the problem-solving process, don’t understand why change is happening, and feel threatened by top down decisions. Sound familiar? This negative attitude apparently prevails among many faculty at many different kinds of institutions. Highered remains a very hierarchical place, where org charts divide faculty into separate, isolated units nested within colleges and divisions ruled by deans and vice presidents. Yet highered is also very democratic. Faculty often see themselves as the institution’s leaders–the people who make the thing go. (Remember that famous quip at Columbia: “Mr. President, we are not employees of the university. We ARE the university.”)
Wheatley’s recommendations seem especially well-suited for highered. She observes that, in contemporary organizations, time and money are scarce, hence, people are the primary resource. This reality explains why she advocates strongly for self regulating teams. The new science affirms that the tendency in the natural world is for self regulation. Leaders, serving as hosts, create the spaces and structures by which people can come together. As host, the leader invites their creativity, connects each individual’s knowledge and talents to the others’, and clarifies their common institutional purpose and values. But not every leader can fulfill this role. In an interview with G. McDonald, Wheatley said she can tell what kind of leader a person is by discerning “how they feel about other people’s capacities.” At the end of the day, do they believe that others are equally capable and competent or not? Host leaders respect the competencies of the team members.
There is very little on gender in Wheatley’s work, so I’m planning another post on that topic. If you search, you find that women leaders are widely perceived as being more collaborative, more empathetic, more caring than men. But the better works understand that women can adopt masculine as well as feminine leadership styles.