Suppose you have been given the assignment of forming a new unit within a corporation. The unit—which is ongoing, not a task force—is responsible for designing, assisting in the implementation of, and monitoring the corporation’s “green” practices. You have been assigned people from a variety of functions, but everyone has some interest in, and detailed knowledge of, environmental issues. As the nominal leader of this new unit, imagine your first meeting.
Everyone is talking, trying to get air time. Feeling a responsibility to make the time productive, you try to bring a degree of order to this by flip-charting some agenda items, structuring people’s participation, and so forth. This is only partly effective. The meeting ends on a somewhat confused and dissatisfied note. The main questions seem to be, What is it we are trying to do and how are we going to do it? There is no general agreement about the answers.
You return to your office and ponder the situation. You take your responsibility seriously; you want to be effective as the leader of this new unit. What are the key questions you ask yourself at this moment?
More than likely, they are something like these:
(1) How can I take charge of this group of headstrong and knowledgeable people?
(2) How can I influence these people to work together harmoniously?
(3) How can I make them accept my influence willingly, so that I don’t have to act in an authoritarian way? (Because I know that won’t work with this group!)
(4) How can I make good things happen in this group and discharge the responsibility I’ve been given?
(5) In short, how can I exercise effective leadership?
These are not bad questions, but we don’t think that they will help you deal effectively and directly with all the issues and situations that the group will face. We think the questions have a limited utility because they all derive from one perspective on leadership—one that sees leadership in terms of dominance and influence: It assumes leadership is happening when an individual called a leader acts in some way to change the behavior or attitudes of others called followers.
If you want to ask additional questions that will help you with this group, we think you need to take a different perspective on leadership. In this paper we will suggest that you look at leadership as a social meaning-making process that occurs in groups of people who are engaged in some activity together.
If you return to your office to ponder the situation while holding this second view of leadership, you would be likely to ask yourself questions such as:
(1) What is the nature of this group of people? Do we have any history of working together?
(2) What is the most effective process of leadership for this group at this time? How might that process change as the group develops into a community with shared history?
(3) How can I, as a holder of some authority derived from being named as chairperson, participate productively in this process of leadership?
We believe that these questions are significantly different from the first set and can lead to importantly different behaviors on the part of any person endowed with authority in a group, as well as on the parts of people in the group with less authority. We also believe that many of the challenges faced by people in organizations today call for new ways of understanding leadership—what it is and what it can and cannot do. We hope to offer here some useful ideas for rethinking leadership, leadership development, and leadership theory. We also hope, in spite of the abstract nature of our inquiry, to be able to say, before the end of this paper, something of practical value to people in positions of authority who would participate in effective processes of leadership. Before that, however, we must back up and start at the beginning. The beginning is the need for people to make sense of their experience.
The Importance of Making Meaning
Whatever else we can say about people, one thing that we all share—across cultures, geography, and time—is the ability, and the hunger, to make things make sense. What does “making sense” mean? This is a hard question that has been dealt with historically in the writings of Wittgenstein, Berkeley, and Kant, to name only three. Our work has been guided mostly by the writings of Nelson Goodman (1978), Jerome Bruner (1986), and Robert Kegan (1982). In the interest of brevity, let’s say that making sense is the process of arranging our understanding of experience so that we can know what has happened and what is happening, and so that we can predict what will happen; it is constructing knowledge of ourself and the world.
This is not the only way of talking about making sense. We could say that making sense is the process of discovering what is really happening. Many, perhaps most, prefer to view reality in this way—as something that can be more or less directly known. It is not our purpose here to refute such a view. Rather, we invite you to consider another view and see what it suggests about leadership. Let’s assume that there is no way to determine what is ultimately real, that the best we can hope for is to make arrangements in our minds that create a coherence out of our experience. This view is called constructivism (Bruner, 1986; Fingarette, 1963; Goodman, 1984; Kegan, 1982; Piaget, 1954).
Taking the constructivist perspective, consider the following example of the process of understanding. You are out for a walk and the sky grows dark and you hear a distant rumbling sound. Unless you have a peculiar phobia, you do not panic and cower in fear. You know what is happening. But how have you come to know this? How have you come to possess a set of assumptions about what you are hearing? How are you able to interpret the sights and sounds so that you know what they mean and, more, so that you can anticipate and plan your actions accordingly?
One answer is that you have constructed this knowledge out of the raw material of your experience, which of course includes being told about thunderstorms by others from the time of your earliest memories. This construction of the experience of a thunderstorm constitutes your understanding and therefore makes up the reality of such storms for you. Let’s give a name to that set of assumptions in your head that allows you to interpret sensory information, anticipate future events, and plan accordingly. Let’s call it a meaning-making structure. Understanding can then be said to consist of a process of using meaning-making structures to construct knowledge about experience so that one is able to interpret, anticipate, and plan. Meaning-making makes sense of an action by placing it within some larger frame, and this frame is seen by the person who makes sense as the way the world is and thus guides the person in his or her way of being in the world (Bruner, 1986; Goodman, 1978). In this way, reality is said to be a construction.
In this constructivist view, people make meaning individually—they construct their own personal experience so that it makes sense for various periods in their lives as they grow and develop (Kegan, 1982; Kelly, 1955; Perry, 1968)—and people make meaning socially—they construct their experience together (Berger & Luckman, 1966; Bruner, 1986; Goodman, 1978) so that they can communicate and cooperate and agree about what is happening. They can interpret, anticipate, and plan together. The processes of individual meaning-making and social meaning-making are deeply interrelated, as individuals are deeply related to the social systems in which they live.
What are the implications of this for leadership?
Applying Meaning to Leadership
Adopting the constructivist view, we can see leadership as a tool that people use in their relations with one another. The purpose of this tool is to make sense, to make meaning. Leadership in organizations can likewise be seen as more about making meaning than about making decisions and influencing people. The process of making meaning in certain kinds of social settings constitutes leadership. In other words, we can regard leadership as meaning-making in a community of practice.
There are other processes of meaning-making, to be sure. For individuals, there are such processes as learning, ego development, and spiritual development. In social contexts, there are such processes as language, knowledge systems, the arts, and, of course, on the largest scale, culture itself. Leadership, as a type of social meaning-making process, is related to other such processes but discernibly different from them by virtue of its application in a community of practice (that is, a group of people with a shared history of doing something, usually work, together).
There are other ways to express this idea. The words we use in this paper seem to be the shortest way to say it, and that’s why we like them, but it is not necessary to use just those words. One might just as well say that leadership is the process of making sense of what people are doing together so that people will understand and be committed. Or one might say that leadership is the social sense-making process that creates interpersonal influence—in other words, one person does what some other person influences him or her to do because doing it makes sense to both people. We hope you will be able to think of other ways of expressing the idea as we go along. Putting the idea in different words is a way of exploring it.
Still another way to talk about this is to lay out the terms we use, define them briefly, and then try to string them together. Meaning can be thought of as a cognitive and emotional framework (an internal structure of ideas and feelings) that allows a person to know (in the sense of understand) some world version (a representation of the way things are and the way they ought to be) and that places the person in relation to this world version. Given this way of thinking about meaning, meaning-making then consists of the creation, nurturance, and evolution (or revolution) of these cognitive and emotional frameworks. When the making of such frameworks happens in a community of practice (people united in a common enterprise who share a history and thus certain values, beliefs, ways of talking, and ways of doing things), then we can say that leadership is happening.
To repeat, we are not offering this as a definition of leadership. With definitions, people rightly call on the definer to defend the truth, or at least the internal consistency, of the definition. We would prefer you regard our outlook as if it were true and see where that might lead. What we are offering is a way of categorizing, or a scheme of organizing, the concept of leadership. As Nelson Goodman (1978, p. 129) points out, the argument in support of such an offering consists not of defending the truth of the scheme but rather of arguing for its efficacy in understanding leadership as a concept and phenomenon. Thus, you need not give up your own definition of leadership. Better, in fact, to hang onto it and to experiment with viewing your own understanding of leadership in light of the outlook being offered here.
How is this view of leadership significantly different from other views? What do we see as the major advantages of adopting this view?
At the highest level of abstraction, what is different about the view offered here is that most other views begin with the assumption that leadership is a dominance-cum-social-influence process. Most existing theories, models, and definitions of leadership proceed from the assumption that somehow leadership is about getting people to do something. In our view, dominance is but one approach to meaning-making (though perhaps, in complex situations, not often the best approach), and social influence is another approach and can also be seen as an outcome of leadership, but not the only outcome (problem solving, satisfaction, actualization, closure, and significance are some others, for example) and it is not the only reason humans engage in leadership.
The difference in these two basic views rests on deep assumptions about the nature of human energy and motivation. The dominance-cum-social-influence view assumes that humans are naturally still, at rest, and that they need some motivating force to get them going. The meaning-making view being offered here, on the other hand, assumes that people are naturally in motion, always doing something (Kelly, 1955), and that they need, rather than motivation to act, frameworks within which their actions make sense.
Out of this major difference in underlying assumption arises another important difference and, we think, an important advantage: When you do not see dominance and social influence as the basic activities of leadership, you no longer need to think of leadership predominantly in terms of leaders (people who influence others) and followers (those who are influenced). Instead, you can think about leadership as a process in which everyone in a community, or group, is engaged. This is a way of viewing leadership as part of a context. Leadership, instead of being a generic force that a person called a leader can apply willy-nilly to any group of people, becomes a community-specific process that arises in various forms and with various effects whenever people attempt to work together. People may play varying roles, some involving formal authority and power, which may offer the opportunity to make unique contributions to the process of leadership, but we need not extend special status to these roles above others, as all roles can be seen as contributing uniquely. This means that we may be able to disentangle power and authority from leadership (Heifetz, in press) and this in turn may allow us to better understand the relationship of these various social processes (power, authority, leadership) to one another.
This last point bears repeating and emphasis. In the view of leadership being offered here, authority, which Heifetz (in press) defines as “conferred power to perform a service,” is quite different from leadership. Being related, the two phenomena are, we think, often confused, and this confuses much of the thinking about both authority and leadership. In the terms we offer here, authority is an important means of generating coherence within groups, organizations, and societies and is thus a frequent tool by which meaning is made in communities of practice; it, therefore, is often used in the leadership process. But to confuse authority and leadership is to confuse means and ends. Authority is a tool for making sense of things (making meaning) but so are other human tools such as norms, values, work systems, and goal-path structures. Leadership, on the other hand, is understood here as the process through which people put these tools to work to create meaning.
Taking this view of leadership may also allow us to add to our concepts of leadership development (see Palus & Drath, in press). Instead of focusing leadership development almost exclusively on training individuals to be leaders, we may, using this view, learn to develop leadership by improving everyone’s ability to participate in the process of leadership. This would require research to help us understand what roles, behaviors, and capacities are involved in leadership as a social meaning-making process.
By allowing us to better see leadership as a shared human process, as an activity that people engage in together, seeing leadership as meaning-making may also help us clarify the relationship between certain individual traits (such as intelligence, dominance, initiative-taking, and risk-taking) and leadership. We may come to see that the people we call natural leaders (charismatic leaders, powerful individual leaders, inspired leaders) are the people who are able, for reasons of intelligence, knowledge, and experience, to express formulations of meaning in behalf of a community—they can say what people have in their minds and hearts—and that doing this often seems to imbue these people with almost superhuman characteristics, and that these characteristics can then subsequently be difficult to disentangle from the process of leadership. We may be surprised to learn just how social this process we see as individual leadership really is. We may also come to see that the leadership process is not limited to individuals making meaning in behalf of the community. Other, more distributed processes may thus become available to people to improve their life and work together.