No Such Thing as a Leader
Doug Borwick

New Ways of Learning and Leading
11-12 June 1994
Wells College
Aurora, NY

Introduction
There is a sea change underway in the world's understanding of the nature of leadership.  The shift from hierarchical/mechanical models of leadership to heterarchical/organic models is discussed in almost every book or article dealing with the subject.  Yet,  something does not "feel" right about this literature.  While the new models are based upon conceiving of leadership through means other than authority and power, our language makes it nearly impossible to do so.  "Leader" inevitably means someone in charge and with authority.  The servant leader and leader/follower models represent an effort to get around this, but in the end the word leader connotes power and authority.

This paper attempts to develop a way of divorcing the word leader from consideration of the meaning of leadership, and to see whether or not that proves helpful.  (This then is the origin of the title "No Such Thing as a Leader.")  Finally, and most importantly, it seeks to begin a discussion of how collaborative leadership might be made to work.

The concept of "leaderless leadership" is pointless, however, unless one wants to pursue principles and practices of heterarchical organization.  Waves of economic, social, and conceptual changes are inexorably pressing toward forms of collective enterprise that are not hierarchical.  Before attempting to develop a framework through which to imagine how truly collaborative leadership might operate, it is necessary to present the reasons such changes are inevitable.  An understanding of the forces which have been at work for millennia to lock the word leader together with the concept of power should prove helpful.  In addition, an understanding of the forces which are serving to undermine the efficacy of that model will be equally valuable.

The Roots of Our Organizational and Leadership Models
The hierarchical approach to organizing human activity is based upon a series of assumptions (or, to use Peter Senge's phrase, mental models) about the way the world works.  The following represent a few of these assumptions:

All of these factors led to the development of our early models of complex organizations.  The first were, in all likelihood, religious orders dating back to pre-history.  Truth was centralized in the gods and conveyed to humanity through a priest or priests.  These models fostered early political constructions?kings, pharaohs, emperors?which in turn served as the structural template for military hierarchy.  These in turn became the models for all later complex organizations in our society.

In the political sphere, the simpler the systems were, the better the approach worked.  Small, homogeneous kingdoms could be held in control this way.  However, early in Western history, the great emperors understood the need for decentralization as territories increased and became more diverse.  The longest-lasting empires were those which distributed authority around the empire and chose assimilation over subjugation of peoples.

While the assumptions listed are not all the ones which have led to the prevalence of hierarchical structures, they serve as illustrative.  What is interesting here is that a process is occurring which is forcing the re-evaluation of each of them.

Clearly, many systemic pressures are at work to undermine the efficacy of hierarchically structured organizations.  These pressures are providing impetus to develop other means of organizing enterprise.  The process of moving away from hierarchical structures toward something else ("heterarchical"?) appears inevitable, even if the pace of that movement proves to be glacial.

Mental Model Morass
One of the difficulties in contemporary discussions of leadership stems from assumptions we make about the nature of organizational structure.  The existence of traditional assumptions alongside new and contradictory information or developments has resulted in a semantic mess in the field of leadership theory.  Definitions of leadership and management as well as discussions of "good" and "bad" leadership are tied to unexamined assumptions about the way enterprise is organized.

Two illustrations will help to make the point.  First, while most contemporary discussions of leadership theory presume non-hierarchical means of mobilizing resources, the language we use makes the discussion exceedingly difficulty.  Regardless of our intent, the word "leader" inevitably implies someone in charge and with authority.  This unconsciously clouds our thinking about leadership.  The servant leader and leader/follower models represent attempts to circumvent this difficulty.  But "leader" will always imply authority or control.  This paper, a version of which was delivered last summer at the Wells College Women's Leadership Institute, attempts to deal with this by discussing leadership exclusively as a group process.  This exercise demonstrates a situation in which language gets in the way of our meaning.  The word "leader" makes it difficult to think the thoughts toward which we are striving.

Second, a great thinker about leadership serves as an example.  Joseph Rost goes a long way toward defining leadership as a collaborative process.  However, his concept of management is solidly rooted in a hierarchical (mechanical) model of organizational structure.  (His definition of management begins with the phrase, "An authority relationship . . . .")  His response to various leadership books reflects a possible misunderstanding of their intent.  For instance, Rost categorizes Max DePree's Leadership Is An Art as one of a group of works about "good management" rather than leadership.  This may be true given Rost's mental model of organizational structure.  However, it is equally possible that DePree is writing from the perspective of an organic or information-based model of organizational structure.  From that point of view, facilitating the processes by which people function together as a group and by which they pass and share information is leadership.  DePree's view of leadership may be based on an organic model of organizations, Rost's on a mechanical one.  They then see the same trait as two different things.  From the mechanical perspective, concern with the "heart" of an organization is good management; from the organic it is the essential function of leadership.

The Paradigmatic Shift
The cultural assumptions mentioned earlier represent a world view which Western society has shared for centuries.  What is at work to counter them is an increasing awareness of the complexity of the world and of the relationships that exist within it.  In the history of astronomy, it was not until detailed observations of the heavens were made that the Western world was forced to make the shift from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican view of the universe.  Events of the last eighty years have demonstrated that the myriad of human experience represented in any society and the interdependencies we share form a dizzyingly complex web.  That web nearly precludes analysis.  In the same way, the late-Ptolemaic astronomical charts, which attempted to buttress that world view, collapsed under their own weight just before the sun-centered view of the solar system finally gained the advantage.

A paradigm shift in both the scientific and social realms at least as significant as the Copernican revolution is underway.  The change involves moving from mechancial to organic (or biological) models as the metaphors for understanding the world and relationships.  It has at its core a new appreciation for raw "disembodied" information as the glue which holds the world together.  Numerous books deal with this subject.  One that is easily readable is Margaret Wheatley's Leadership and the New Science.  In it she says that, rather than life's outward structures being fundamental, it is information that organizes matter into those forms. (104)

This paradigm shift will inevitably have an impact upon organizational structures and, therefore, upon our understanding of leadership.  In application to issues of leadership, Ms. Wheatley says "if organizations are machines, control makes sense.  If organizations are process structures, then seeking to impose control through permanent structure is suicide." (23)

The Centrality of Relationships
In the new paradigmatic order, organizations will be conceived of differently from the way they are today.  They will be viewed as relationships using energy to process information.  The quality of the results (and the level of productivity in arriving at them) will be determined by the quality of the organization's relationships.  An operative description I have employed to describe this form of leadership is the phenomenon of functional individuals coming together to create functional groups.

This centrality of relationships cannot be overemphasized in understanding new ways of imagining organizations (and, thus, truly new ways of understanding the nature of leadership).  Speaking from the perspective of physics, Margaret Wheatley says, "In the quantum world, relationships are not just interesting; to many physicists, they are all there is to reality." (32) And, "The quantum world has demolished the concept of the unconnected individual." (38) Peter Senge, in his article at the beginning of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, observes that "relationships are . . . more fundamental than things . . . .  We do not have to create interrelatedness.  The world is already interrelated." (25)

Yeahbut
Numerous forces at work to undermine the inevitability of hierarchical leadership structures.  However, presentation of this informaton brings an immediate response of: "Yeah, but you can't get anything done without someone leading."

What's In A Name?
Part of the problem lies in tying the word leader to particular tasks.  We invest the leader with weight, with status, with power.  It is a societal bias that values some roles over others.  A race car driver is, in the eyes of the public, the most valued member of the team, in spite of the fact that the mechancics have as least as much to do with success as the driver.  Similarly, whoever we call "the leader" is considered the most important or the most powerful, creating an inevitable hierarchy.

When people say someone has got to be the leader, they are referring to jobs such as assigning tasks, supervising, and making the tough decisions when speed is of the essence.  The attempt here is to avoid the term leader is an effort to separate those (and similar) tasks from the authoritarian weight that the word leader carries.  Tasks heretofore limited to the purview of the "leader" can then be apportioned by the group to those it feels are best suited to carrying them out, doing so without skewing the group into a hierarchical structure.  This is not just a semantic trick.  The reality it implies is one of the most difficult aspects of the shift to collaborative enterprise, but the words do influence the way we think about the issues.

Give It A Chance
It is much too early to say that leaderless leadership cannot work.  It has not been attempted on any mass scale.  Hierarchical leadership has had millenia to work out the bugs.  To write off another approach because its method of operation is not immediately apparent is terribly short-sighted.

Connected Leadership
At the same time, there is precedent suggesting that connected or relational leadership can be much more effective than hierarchical leadership.  A poem aptly illustrates this point.

This poem is often considered a statement about mortality and our individual insignificance in the great swath of human history.  It may also be taken as a critique of authoritarian leadership.  When an individual is "leading" by pulling or pushing, the results quickly fade when she or he leaves the scene. Most people can recall unsuccessful experiences when an attempt has been made to pull a group along with them.  Contrast this with the results of the work of individuals whose efforts were "connected" to those with whom they worked: for example, Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed.  The importance of leadership being rooted in relationships cannot be overstressed.  Success in individualized leadership is limited to either small tasks or to short term results.  Lasting impact results more readily from connected leadership.

Making Distributed Leadership/Management Work
Introduction
Joseph Rost's Leadership for the Twenty-first Century demonstrates the importance of defining leadership when one is talking about it.  The point of this paper is not the creation of a definition but the beginning of a discussion about the implementation of distributed forms of leadership.  Nevertheless, a definition is a good idea and Rost's view fits with the ideas contained here, excepting the fact that he still uses the words leader and follower.  However, his fifth chapter does make the point that ". . . followers do not do followership, they do leadership.  Both leaders and followers form one relationship that is leadership.  There is no such thing as followership in the new school of leadership."  (109)  With that caution, his definition of leadership may be helpful: "an influence relationship among leaders and followers who intend real changes that reflect their mutual purpose." (102)

The concern here is not with the definition of leadership, but in how to make this new approach work.  Toward that end, an operating description for leadership is that it is not a trait residing in an individual.  It is a characteristic of a group of people (as in "that company has good leadership").  The group must be responsible for its own leadership.  Leadership is the process of a group arriving at a shared vision and then implementing that vision.

Having addressed the need for defintion, however, that leaves the question, so what do we do?  There are two things that must be addressed to respond to that question.  First, how is good leadership encouraged, and, second, given this model, how do we "get stuff done"?

Preparation for Leadership

Examine Self With the given definition, good leadership is a product of functional individuals coming together to make up a functional group.  The first step in leadership development, therefore, is each individual "examining" themselves.  If the members of a group are not individually equipped to answer basic questions like "Who am I?", "What motivates me?", "What are my abilities?", and "What do I chose to do with my life?", the group's effectiveness will suffer.

Value Others Another key component in effective group process is the development of a common appreciation of the potential which human difference represents.  Groups must learn the strengths and weaknesses of each member, respect (and utilize) the strengths, and accept the truth that different people have different contributions to make.

Develop Group Skills Finally, the group itself must develop a self-identity.  In a process much like the self-evaluation just mentioned, a group must be able to answer the questions "Who are we?", "What motivates us?", and "What do we chose to do?"

These are the building blocks that must be in place before collaborative leadership can happen.

Getting Stuff Done (Management)
Rost's definition of leadership specifically rejects connection to results.  Rightly, he considers implementation to be something different from leadership and this he calls management.  Unfortunately, his own definition of management is rigidly hierarchical and does no good in constructing a mechanism for organizing collaborative enterprise.

Collaborative management (giving substance to the will generated by heterarchical leadership) can be pursued by understanding projects as a series of tasks which can be distributed across a group according to the strengths and interests of members of the group.  The component parts of such a process are Preparation, Oversight, Implementation, and Evaluation.

The list is incomplete (especially the implementation section) but it provides a checklist a group can use as an aid in dividing a project among its members.

Distributed Leadership in the Classroom
Let me conclude by talking about the impact of this model upon my courses.  I run Salem College's Arts Management Program.  I have attempted this year to utilize this model in course assignments.  In both my introductory course and in an advanced course, students had as one of their major assignments, the task of putting on a public arts event.  The introductory class did this in small groups of four or five.  The advanced class did it as a committee of the whole.

I reviewed with each class the process model I just discussed and then told them to work on their own to design and carry out a project.  The resulting projects from the introductory class's small groups ranged from very good to stunning.  The advanced class's project was considerably more ambitious and was not as obviously successful.

Those students who were in both classes generally felt more comfortable with the small group project.  It was, as they pointed out, much easier to "stay on top of" than the large group one.  Most students in the advanced class expressed some level of discomfort at not having an understanding of how each piece of the puzzle was coming together as they did their part.  The two biggest criticisms of that project were the lack of an explicit understanding of who could make detail decisions on behalf of the group (without waiting for another meeting) and, this was the more important complaint, the lack of a written record of what had been decided by the group about individual and subcommittee responsibilities and about details of the project.  Memory did not serve as a strong enough tool to alleviate ambiguity.  Virtually every member of that class urged that in the future someone be designated to keep detailed "minutes" of every meeting and distribute them in written form to every member of the group.

These two courses were my first forays into the exploration of truly collaborative management.  As we begin to consider how heterarchical management might work, the stakes may be excessively high to conduct these sorts of experiments in the "real world."  The college classroom may give us our best opportunity to conduct initial investigations of the potential of this approach to organizing enterprise.

Conclusion
If successful coping with the future will entail profoundly altering the way we conceive of organizing the accomplishment of tasks, it behooves us to begin the process of deciding what form the new structures will take and how the new modes of operation will be made to work.  We suffer major obstacles along the way.  We are in a semantic mess over what the words leader, leadership, and management mean.  This often prevents us from discovering that when we disagree about leadership or management we are talking about two (or more) different things, though using the same words.  This "mess" also prevents us from recognizing that I might be talking about the process of developing "good" leadership or management when my colleague thinks we are arguing about definitions.

In addition, as we are standing on those tectonic plates which are our shifting paradigms, we must discover from which position we are attempting to view the issues.  The understanding of what we mean by good leadership or management and the means by which we develop each are profoundly different from the hierarchical perspective than from the "heterarchical" one.

We are faced with the increasing uncertainty of the world in which we attempt to function, the recognition that decision by the few is dangerously limiting, and the realization that single points of view are only a tiny fraction of the realm of possibility.  In that context, the notion that hierarchies are the exclusive model for structuring acitivity is being actively reconsidered.  What is necessary is extensive discussion about not only the theories around which we will structure the way we act, but more importantly, how we will then act.  Lines of authority appear, in theory, to be diminishing in effectiveness.  Webs of inter-relationships seem to offer an attractive alternative model.  The critical question is how can they be made to work?