Conclusion: Changing Constructs of Leadership
In presenting this way of looking at leadership—as meaning-making in communities of practice—we are suggesting that leadership is itself a social construct, an artifact of that ever-rolling process of making sense of this world we share. Surely our way of understanding leadership has evolved over time and continues to do so.
We can think about our earliest ways of understanding leadership as arising in dominance. We can take a process-view of dominance as a meaning-making activity. Think of a group of primates ruled by one dominant individual. The process of dominant leadership can be described thus: The most powerful (the strongest, smartest) individual enforces compliance with his or her individual needs and wants; power produces compliance through the linking of fear and protection—the followers are afraid of the dominant individual and therefore feel protected by that individual. This can be summarized, in terms of process, as power producing compliance through fear-cum-protection.
Perhaps, as the means by which dominant individuals exercised their power, such as muscle and wits, became available to more people through technology (weapons and writing, for example), dominance began to need supplementing as a way of constructing (understanding) leadership. What may then have entered into the leadership construct is the possibility of people being persuaded by other people, and we get leadership as an influence process. This construct is likely quite old, by the way. The Oxford English Dictionary, based on a use of the word dating to the thirteenth century, defines one sense of the verb lead as being “to bring by persuasion into a condition.” This is, for all its age, a pretty good summation of many of our current definitions of leadership.
Influence as the basis for understanding leadership can also be understood as a meaning-making process. We might say (somewhat awkwardly because our language is weak in conveying process) that periodic influential inputs from persuasive individuals continuously build and refine people’s belief that they are engaged in some beneficial activity. Briefly put, this process can be summarized as persuasiveness producing conviction. This is the essence, perhaps, of the meaning-making process of influence.
The key idea here is that we humans did not and have not replaced the dominance construct with the influence construct. We have more likely supplemented dominance with influence. Influence as a way of understanding leadership is layered over dominance as a way of understanding leadership. This makes our construct richer and more useful, but it also leads to confusion and uncertainty. While one person may point to the need for leaders to bring people to a condition by persuasion, another person may point out that often leaders must act independently and dominate situations for the good of all. We are confused: Is leadership influence or dominance? Is influence just a softer way to practice dominance? How are individual traits related to dominance, such as intelligence and a deep voice, related to the ability to influence others? Isn’t leadership, after all, just that which people called leaders do? And thus we search for the key to leadership in the layers of our ways of constructing leadership.
More recently, a new layer, a new way of understanding leadership has been added: participative leadership, it might be termed. This layer adds to both the richness and the confusion. How can leaders take charge of a situation and act influentially while still allowing real participation? Isn’t participation just a more clever way to gain influence? And isn’t it ultimately just a much deeper ploy to gain dominance? And if leaders really do allow participation, doesn’t one person finally have to make a decision? And then what happens to participation? Again, we search for the elusive key to leadership among the convoluted layers of our constructs of leadership.
We are suggesting that there is a way of understanding leadership that has the potential for sorting out all the others and getting us past our confusion without giving up richness: leadership as meaning-making or sense-making. Whenever people are doing something together for any period of time extended enough to form a community, we can usefully think of the striving to make things make sense, to create meaning out of that experience, as the process of leadership—however that process plays out and with whatever participation by various individuals.
Our constructs of leadership, it seems, have been built up around what is perhaps, ultimately, an epiphenomenon—the powerful individual taking charge. This aspect of leadership is like the whitecaps on the sea—prominent and captivating, flashing in the sun. But to think about the sea solely in terms of the tops of waves is to miss the far vaster and more profound phenomenon out of which such waves arise—it is to focus attention on the tops and miss the sea beneath. And so leadership may be much more than the dramatic whitecaps of the individual leader, and may be more productively understood as the deep blue water we all swim in when we work together.