WMOM:LiaA:chap2

# What Is Leadership?

The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say
thank you. In between the two, the leader must become a servant and a
debtor. That sums up the progress of an artful leader.

Concepts
of leadership, ideas about leadership, and leadership practices are the
subject of much thought, discussion, writing, teaching, and learning.
True leaders are sought after and cultivated. Leadership is not an easy
subject to explain. A friend of mine characterizes leaders simply like
this: "Leaders don't inflict pain; they bear pain."

The goal of
thinking hard about leadership is not to produce great or charismatic or well-known leaders. The measure of leadership is not the quality of the head, but the tone of the body. The signs of outstanding leadership
appear primarily among the followers. Are the followers reaching their
potential? Are they learning? Serving? Do they achieve the required
results? Do they change with grace? Manage conflict?

I would like to ask you to think about the concept of leadership in a certain way.
Try to think about a leader, in the words of the gospel writer Luke, as
"one who serves." Leadership is a concept of owing certain things to the institution. It is a way of thinking about institutional heirs, a way of thinking about stewardship as contrasted with ownership. Robert Greenleaf has written an excellent book about this idea, *Servant Leadership*.

The art of leadership requires us to think about the leader-as-steward in
terms of relationships: of assets and legacy, of momentum and
effectiveness, of civility and values.

*Leaders should leave behind them assets and a legacy.* First, consider assets; certainly leaders owe assets. Leaders owe their institutions vital financial health, and the relationships and
reputation that enable continuity of that financial health. Leaders must deliver to their organizations the appropriate services, products,
tools, and equipment that people in the organization need in order to be accountable. In many institutions leaders are responsible for providing land and facilities.

But what else do leaders *owe?* What are artful leaders responsible for? Surely we need to include people.
People are the heart and spirit of all that counts. Without people,
there is no need for leaders. Leaders can decide to be primarily
concerned with leaving assets to their institutional heirs or they can
go beyond that and capitalize on the opportunity to leave a legacy, a
legacy that takes into account the more difficult, qualitative side of
life, one which provides greater meaning, more challenge, and more joy
in the lives of those whom leaders enable.

Besides owing assets
to their institutions, leaders owe the people in those institutions
certain things. Leaders need to be concerned with the institutional
value system which, after all, leads to the principles and standards
that guide the practices of the people in the institution. Leaders owe a clear statement of the values of the organization. These values should
be broadly understood and agreed to and should shape our corporate and
individual behavior. What is this value system based on? How is it
expressed? How is it audited? These are not easy questions to deal with.

Leaders are also responsible for future leadership. They need to identify, develop, and nurture future leaders.

Leaders are responsible for such things as a sense of quality in the
institution, for whether or not the institution is open to influence and open to change. Effective leaders encourage contrary opinions, an
important source of vitality. I am talking about how leaders can nurture the roots of an institution, about a sense of continuity, about
institutional culture.

Leaders owe a covenant to the cooperation
or institution, which is, after all, a group of people. Leaders owe the
organization a new reference point for what caring, purposeful,
committed people can be in the institutional setting. Notice I did not
say what people can do—what we can do is merely a consequence of what we can be. Corporations, like the people who compose them, are always in a state of becoming. Covenants bind people together and enable them to
meet their institutional needs by meeting the needs of one another. We must
do this in a way that is consonant with the world around us.

Leaders owe a certain maturity. Maturity as expressed in a sense
of self-worth, a sense of belonging, a sense of expectancy, a sense of
responsibility, a sense of accountability, and a sense of equality.

Leaders owe the corporation rationality. Rationality gives reason and mutual
understanding to programs and to relationships. It gives visible order.
Excellence and commitment and competence are available to us only under
the rubric of rationality. A rational environment values trust and human dignity and provides the opportunity for personal development and
self-fulfillment in the attainment of the organization's goals.

Business literacy, understanding the economic basis of a cooperation, is
essential. Only a group of people who share a body of knowledge and
continually learn together can stay vital and viable.

Leaders owe people space, space in the sense of freedom. Freedom
in the sense of enabling our gifts to be exercised. We need to give each other the space to grow, to be ourselves, to exercise our diversity. We need to give each other space so that we may both give and receive such beautiful things as ideas, openness, dignity, joy, healing, and
inclusion. And in giving each other the gift of space, we need also to
offer the gifts of grace and beauty to which each of us is entitled.

Another way to think about what leaders owe is to ask this question: What is it without which this institution would not be what it is?

*Leaders are obligated to provide and maintain momentum.* Leadership comes with a lot of debts to the future. There are more
immediate obligations as well. Momentum is one. Momentum in a vital
company is palpable. It is not abstract or mysterious. It is the feeling among a group of people that their lives and work are intertwined and
moving toward a recognizable and legitimate goal. It begins with
competent leadership and a management team strongly dedicated to
aggressive managerial development and opportunities. This team's job is
to provide an environment that allows momentum to gather.

Momentum comes from a clear vision of what the cooperation ought to be, from a
well-thought-out strategy to achieve that vision, and from carefully
conceived and communicated directions and plans that enable everyone to
participate and be publicly accountable in achieving those plans.

Momentum depends on a pertinent but flexible research and
development program led by people with outstanding gifts and unique
talents. Momentum results when a cooperation has an aggressive,
professional, inspired group of people in its marketing and recruitment units. Momentum results when the operations group serves its customers in such a way that the customer sees them as their best supplier of tools,
equipment, and services. Underlying these complex activities is the
essential role of the financial team. They provide the financial
guidelines and the necessary ratios. They are responsible for equity
among the various groups that compose the corporate family.

*Leaders are responsible for effectiveness.* Much has been
written about effectiveness—some of the best of it by Peter Drucker. He
has such a great ability to simplify concepts. One of the things he
tells us is that efficiency is doing the thing right, but effectiveness
is doing the right thing.

Leaders can delegate efficiency, but
they must deal personally with effectiveness. Of course, the natural
question is "how." We could fill many pages dealing with how to be
effective, but I would like to touch on just two ways.

The first
is the understanding that effectiveness comes about through enabling
others to reach their potential—both their personal potential and their
organizational or institutional potential.

In some South Pacific cultures, a speaker holds a conch shell as a symbol of a temporary position of authority. Leaders must understand
who holds the conch—that is, who should be listened to and when. This
makes it possible for people to use their gifts to the fullest for the
benefit of everyone.

Sometimes, to be sure, a leader must choose
who is to speak. That is part of the risk of leadership. A leader must
assess capability. A leader must be a judge of people. For leaders
choose a person, not a position.

Another way to improve
effectiveness is to encourage roving leadership. Roving leadership
arises and expresses itself at varying times and in varying situations,
according to the dictates of those situations. Roving leaders have the
special gifts or the special strengths or the special temperament to
lead in these special situations. They are acknowledged by others who
are ready to follow them. (See "Roving Leadership.")

*Leaders must take a role in developing, expressing, and defending civility and values.* In a civilized institution or corporation, we see good manners, respect for persons, an understanding of "good goods," and an appreciation of
the way in which we serve each other.

Civility has to do with
identifying values as opposed to following fashions. Civility might be
defined as an ability to distinguish between what is actually healthy
and what merely appears to be popular. A leader can tell the difference
between living edges and dying ones.

To lose sight of the beauty of ideas and of hope and opportunity,
and to frustrate the right to be needed, is to be at the dying edge.

To be a part of a throwaway mentality that discards goods and ideas, that
discards principles and law, that discards persons and families, is to
be at the dying edge.

To be at the leading edge of consumption, affluence, and instant gratification is to be at the dying edge.

To ignore the dignity of work and the elegance of simplicity, and the
essential responsibility of serving each other, is to be at the dying
edge.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is reported to have said this about simplicity: "I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side
of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other
side of complexity." To be at the living edge is to search out the
"simplicity on the other side of complexity."

In a day when so much energy seems to be spent on maintenance and manuals, on bureaucracy and meaningless quantification, to be a leader is to enjoy the special
privileges of complexity, of ambiguity, of diversity. But to be a leader means, especially, having the opportunity to make a meaningful
difference in the lives of those who permit leaders to lead.