Foreword

LEADERSHIP, I HAVE SAID over the years, is the ability to raise one’s voice over the general chaotic buzz of an organization and later turn out to have been right. I came up with this “definition” partly out of frustration over all the definitions that there are of this word that attracts so much interest, and partly from a realization that we don’t often think of giving or receiving “leadership” in the instant that it is occurring. Only later do we realize that either we or someone else had supplied “leadership.”

In the instant we are doing what we think needs doing. Our behavior is specific and concrete, and of course quite complex. Meanwhile, “leadership” is abstract and general. The words we use to talk about it—words about style and about function and about content—similarly tend to be abstract and general. It is very difficult to talk meaningfully about “leadership” in terms of the concrete attitudes and actions leaders display, and in terms of the concrete responses they receive.

There’s another problem many of us who teach and consult about leadership continually encounter. If we talk about leadership abstractly, presenting theories and frameworks for thinking about leadership, participants will often object: “This is all too general. How does it apply to my situation?” Whereas if we get down and dirty and try to be as specific as we can about, say, leading a meeting, the response we often get is, “My situation isn’t quite like this one you’re describing.” At this point, if we attempt to elicit the details of a particular participant’s situation, we can see the eyes of others beginning to glaze over, because to get really specific about one participant’s situation is probably to get into details of personality and of culture and of technology and of formal structure that seem far removed from the situations of other participants.

A final chronic problem with teaching and training about leadership is that there’s doing it and then there’s talking about it. No amount of talking about it seems to result in people becoming better at doing it. This problem has led to all kinds of attempts to introduce more “experiential” material into classes and training situations. It is very hard to achieve a truly convincing reality to these experiential situations. Adult training and development practices have probably done a better job than the academic environment. We professors keep interrupting experiential material to point out the presence of concepts, or to have people write in journals, or discuss what was going on in the simulation. Such interruptions may be justified for other reasons, but they do detract from the impact of the leadership situations we foster in classrooms. No doubt there are other conundrums associated with teaching and training about leadership. But these three—the split between abstract and concrete, the paradoxes of prescribing generally versus concretely, and the fact that leading and talking about leading are two different things—are enough to make the point: that despite thousands of books and articles about leadership, and who knows how many millions of hours devoted to discussing it, to say nothing of all the actual leading that is going on constantly in the world, the nature of leadership, how to do it better, and how to teach others to do it remain maddeningly elusive. If it weren’t so important, we probably should have given up the attempt years ago.

And indeed important it is. As this is being published—at the beginning of 2011—it cannot be more obvious that the world is full of problems that cry out for leadership. We are fond of talking about the leadership that we need from our national and international leaders and from senior executives in organizations, but the fact is that all these individuals can do is inspire more leadership throughout the organizations and institutions that they “lead.” New and better things will happen because of the efforts of these more local leaders as much or more than the efforts of the men and women on the world stage.

Against this background, Scott Allen and Mitch Kusy have produced this wonderful little book of practical wisdom about leading and leadership. I welcome their decision not to produce yet another abstract framework that tries to say once and for all what leadership is. Once and for all, there is no “once and for all” about leadership. What exists, though, are lots of ideas about leading more effectively and what the learning process for leadership is. This is what the authors offer. Each of their “tips” pertains to some sort of problem or situation leaders encounter. You can quickly tell that the authors themselves have “been there, done that.” Each tip resolves the abstract-versus-concrete issue I mentioned earlier by just staying practical and describing things a leader or leadership educator can actually do to move the learning along.

Are there fifty-one or a hundred and fifty-one such tips that could have gone into this book? Yes, there are as many tips as there are nuances to leadership learning. The point is not whether the authors have captured them all. Rather, each tip will start a reflection process that will lead you on to your own realizations, to your own tips to keep in mind as you go about your leadership learning, regardless of what role you are in.

As a final comment for this Foreword, I want to point out something the authors neglect, and that most writers on management and leadership neglect as a matter of fact. Behind all these tips, and behind everything else that is written about management and leadership, is a general consciousness that focuses on how the organization is working, how the people in it are doing, and what can be done to make the organization more effective and the people in it have a more meaningful and fulfilling experience. We take for granted that this consciousness exists and is understood, but I often wonder if it is. Within all of us is a little bone that wants things to run smoothly and for members to have a good experience without our having to work very hard to achieve it or facilitate it.

In fact, every good leader knows that you have to work on the organization, not just in it, all the time—a distinction I have heard attributed to Peter Drucker. Good leaders also know that the leader-manager’s main business is to work on the organization, including on oneself—or better, within oneself and with organization members—to improve the experiences everyone is having. This is the key to productivity; in the long run there is no shortcut whereby people’s experience can be ignored or abused in favor of productivity. Allen and Kusy make abundantly clear what this consciousness I speak of entails. Their tips are about these things, emanating from a nonstop and bone-deep concern for how things are working and how people are doing.

—Peter Vaill, Senior Scholar, Antioch University

Ph.D. Program, Leadership and Change