Learning to let go — A Lesson in Leadership

Below, I share an academic essay I submitted, on a recent leadership experience. The essay demonstrates a self-reflective leadership learning journey that I hope sparks a similar reflection on your leadership practice.

This essay reflects on a leadership experience where I was assigned as group leader for an activity puzzle. The reflections are based on my personal memory of events and notes made by an assigned “observer” who observed the activity with a focus on how leadership was being acted. The essay will begin by reflecting through a leader-centric lens, using Goleman’s leadership styles and HayGroup’s 6 leadership styles to explain the leadership style I was displaying and why I had adopted that style. The essay will then reflect on the events through a follower-centric lens critically analysing my leader-centric perspective using Kerr & Jermier’s (1978) theory on substitutes for leadership and Shamir et al (2007) theory on followership to provide a possible explanation for the breakdown of my leadership influence. The reflection will end with discussing how considering a follower-centric lens will develop my practice to better support emergent leadership from other actors and develop a better understanding of leadership as a process of co-production.

Leader-Centric lens:

Leadership styles

Firstly, by paying attention to the assigned leader, it is possible to claim that I had been granted formal authority to enact leadership behaviours. My first actions as the leader showed a commitment towards relationship-oriented styles. In particular, I immediately showed a democratic (Goleman, 2000) and participative style (HayGroup, 2006) by distributing the activity brief to all followers and asking for suggestions from them on possible solutions. Both styles were concerned with building consensus and collaboration to achieve a solution. As Goleman recommended, the adoption of these styles should be to meet the demands of the situation — the democratic style fosters buy-in and collaboration needed to generate ideas and the participative style is effective in situations where the leader is unclear about the best approach. In reflection, my decision was more subconsciously responsive than situationally subscriptive. Psychoanalytic leadership scholars like Keller (2003) would propose that my bias towards these styles is heavily influenced by exposure to leadership figures in my past, such as my parents, who adopted the same styles. This assessment reveals a potential psychological blind spot towards favouring these styles, which may have left me inflexible to meet the change in leader-follower dynamics later in the activity.

Breakdown of influence

A disruption in consensus occurred as the sense of urgency had raised, following a cycle of fruitless attempts at a solution. A few followers had started leaving the main group discussion I was facilitating to construct a solution on their own without my approval. When the eventual successful solution was proposed by a follower (post-it note solution) other followers started to take more directive roles, assigning tasks for other followers to do, and actively driving the post-it note solution. At this point in the activity, the observer notes that “At this stage, Tristan doesn’t seem to be in charge, maybe Emily has taken over” and later “Tristan seems to have regained control” implying that leadership had shifted back and forth. Through a leader-centric lens, this loss of control can be seen as a leadership failure as my leadership influence had become unimportant. However, reviewing the events through a follower-centric lens offer an alternative story of leadership triumph. As Sutherland (2019) proposes, by reframing the classic leader-follower dichotomy towards shared roles as “leadership actors”, a more realistic and holistic view of events emerges.

Follower-Centric lens:

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves”

Lao Tzu

Why did the followers step up?

By seeing followers as leadership actors, it is possible to see how the change in leader-follower dynamic response by actors was to fulfil their unmet needs. Followers’ have unmet needs of clarity (what should we do?), meaning (why are we doing this?) and safety (will we be okay doing this?) (Jackson & Parry, 2018). The democratic and participative styles were unable to fulfil the need for clarity and so they took on pacesetting and directive roles, to compensate for this. According to Kerr & Jermier (1978), this illustrates how my influence over followers was neutralised and neither task-oriented nor relationship-oriented styles would have been able to make a difference to the followers’ attitudes or behaviours. This perspective exposes the limitation of a leader-centric perspective as in reality followers are not passive recipients but active co-producers (Shamir et al, 2006). By denying this, I as a leader would fail to recognise that effective leadership is not determined by how well I can impose my style and influence onto followers but by how well I can accept a co-production of leadership with fellow leadership actors.

Accepting followers as co-producers

Retrospectively, I assess that by acknowledging the others as what Shamir et al (2006) advocate for (“followers as co-producers of leadership”) I could have been less threatened by the loss in group consensus and collectiveness and allowed our team to naturally split up into groups earlier in the activity to reach the correct solution faster. My psychological bias towards relationship-oriented styles to sustain consensus and collectiveness may have acted as a barrier for other leadership actors to compensate for what my leadership could not fulfil. Considering Kerr & Jermier’s theory, adjusting my leadership style towards a pacesetting or directing role to compensate would have been ineffective as my leadership was neutralised and possibly substituted. Thus in this activity, it was vital that I accepted the contributions from other leadership actors in order to fill the need for clarity.

Developing future practice

Awareness of the limitations of a leader-centric perspective may help me develop leadership skills that can better facilitate an environment where other leadership actors are free to deliver more impact. Furthermore, a limitation of the reflection made here is that this is my reflection of the events based on the notes of the observer and my personal memory and thus the measure of effectiveness is limited to a leader-centric view. For future practice, Meindl (1995) would argue a more holistic approach would be to debrief with the other actors in the activity to collect their reflections on the events and thus understand the experience of leadership as a process of co-production.

References:

Goleman, D. (2000) Leadership That Gets Results. Harvard Business Review [online]. HBR’s Must-Reads on Managing People, pp.2–17. [Accessed 04 December 2022].

HayGroup (2006). Senior Careers Development Service: Hay Group Inventory of Leadership Styles Diagnostic [Electronic PDF]. December. Available from: https://stepup.ucsf.edu/sites/stepup.ucsf.edu/files/PULSEInventoryofLeadershipStyles.pdf [Accessed 04 December 2022].

Jackson, B. and Parry, K. (2018) A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Leadership. 3rd ed. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

Keller, T. (2003) Parental Images as a Guide to Leadership Sensemaking: An Attachment Perspective on Implicit Leadership Theories. The Leadership Quarterly [online]. 14 (2), pp. 141–160. [Accessed 04 December 2022].

Kerr, S. and Jermier, J.M. (1978) Substitutes For Leadership: Their Meaning and Measurement. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance [online]. 22 (3), pp. 375–403. [Accessed 04 December 2022].

Meindl, J.R. (1995) The Romance of Leadership as a Follower-centric Theory: A Social Constructionist Approach. The Leadership Quarterly [online]. 6, pp. 329–341. [Accessed 04 December 2022].

Shamir, B., Pillai, R., Bligh, M.C. and Uhl-Bien, M. (2007) Follower-centered Perspectives on Leadership: A Tribute to the Memory of James R. Meindl [online]. Information Age Publishing Inc: Greenwich. [Accessed 04 December 2022].

Sutherland, N. (2019) Leadership without Leaders: Understanding Anarchist Organizing through the lens of Critical Leadership Studies. In: Carroll, B., Ford, J., Taylor, S. ed. 2 (2019) Leadership 2 Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 248–270.