The Ideal Leader

Written by Mitch McCrimmon, Ph.D. | 03 June 2010

The ideal leader has vision, charisma, integrity, emotional intelligence, an inspiring delivery and sterling character, among other traits. But if there are leaders who don't match this image, then we can't use our ideal to define leadership in general.

Here are some leaders who are out of step with our ideal:

• The teenage gang leader who has “street cred”, is tough and prepared to defy the law, even if it means shooting his way out of trouble.
• Stalin, currently admired by some Russians who like tough leaders even if ruthless.
• Hitler, loathsome values, zero integrity but had a large following.
• Technical leaders, geeks whose new product ideas induce change even if they have no vision, an abrasive style and little emotional intelligence.
• Leaders in scientific or professional functions who exert quiet influence based on hard evidence but who are personally uninspiring.

If these are genuine examples of leadership, then we are kidding ourselves when we claim to be talking about leadership in general. Our ideal leader image is biased in two ways: first it is culturally relative and second, we narrowly focus on larger-than-life characters such as chief executives and heads of state, the heroic, glamorous end of the spectrum.

The real problem here is our determination to define leadership as a type of person instead of as an influence process. When we make the switch, leadership becomes a fleeting episode that can come from anywhere instead of residing exclusively in a fixed hierarchical role. We need to make this shift to match the complexity and dynamic nature of today's world. But first we need to understand our virtual obsession with the leader-as-person idea.

Why must leaders be heroic?

Why do we regard CEOs and heads of countries as our paradigm cases of leadership rather than front-line supervisors? Does our fascination with the larger-than-life leader reveal the essence of leadership or does it really say more about us?

We expect great insights from everyone we admire: pop musicians, movie stars and attractive, tall people. Anyone with charisma or a commanding presence, we assume, must have some unique insight that we ordinary people lack.

We want leaders who transport us with their charm and dazzling wit, who exude confidence and seem impervious to anxiety. We feel brighter when their light shines on us, taking us out of the dull, cool shade we normally occupy. At the extreme, it almost doesn't matter what direction they advocate as long as we can convince ourselves that they know what they are doing.

Surely our need for the heroic leader is a direct reflection of some vacuum within us that only such a person can fill. Otherwise, why wouldn't we take front-line supervisors as paradigm cases of what leadership means?

The deepest needs that we want leaders to fill include: (1) a need for a dream, a cause or purpose to believe in to give our lives meaning, (2) a need to belong, to be part of something, a group with which we can identify and (3) escape from the anxiety that we won't realize our dreams, that we will fail or be rejected, feelings that generate dependency.

It is not just that we search for particular leaders to meet these needs; we actually define leadership in terms of our own needs. But, is this concept of leadership valid for modern, knowledge intensive businesses?

We can approach this question by exploring the core function of the leader: to provide direction.

Vision and direction in leadership

Why is vision so important?  Well, if we are going to be taken on a journey, we want to be sure that the person leading has a destination in mind.

In their book The Leadership Challenge, Kouzes and Posner say that all their thinking about leadership is based on the metaphor of a journey. Leaders, they claim, offer a vision of a journey, inspire us to pursue that vision and then help us get there.

But would we follow a charismatic leader who had no idea where to go or how to get there? Conversely, if we were certain that a leader could get us to a desirable destination, then the lack of charisma, charm and emotional intelligence would not matter much.

For example, suppose you were pursuing an escaped convict in a remote forest. After apprehending him, you discover that you are lost and too far from civilization for your mobile phone to work. Now, if your convict knows the way out of the forest, you would follow his lead even though you did not admire or like him. With minimal trust, you would watch closely where he was taking you.

While we ideally want an all-singing-all-dancing leader, in crunch situations, the only really essential requirement is for the leader to know where to go and how to get there. If you were in a theatre that suddenly caught fire, who would you listen to, the charismatic figure who leaps onto the stage and tells you not to panic or the fireman who appears in a doorway and calls out: "This way"? Again, the ability to provide direction is critical.

If you were asked to vote on who should be the next CEO in your company, would you put your own needs first or those of the business? You might say the latter but a lot of "research" on the meaning of leadership asks employees what they want in a leader, thus focusing on their needs, not those of the business.

Employees don't care as much about the organization's direction as whether it enables them to pursue their dreams and identify with leaders who they can admire. That is, they put their own needs first in thinking about what sort of employer or leader they want.

But if we think about the business first, then it needs leaders who can keep it moving in a direction that generates ongoing prosperity. Hence why direction is a core element of leadership. This is easiest to see in crisis situations like being lost in a forest or caught in a burning building because we deeply care about our own safety. But it's only managers, and not all of them, who care this much about the direction of a business where they are not the owners.

In weighing up the relative importance for leadership of providing direction versus being charismatic, supportive, emotionally intelligent and nurturing, etc., we need to think of what the business needs, not just our own needs.

Why leadership is no longer working

Finding direction in simple situations, like the way out of a burning building, is a lot easier than in complex, fast changing businesses where it is hard enough without considering the unforeseeable actions of competitors and the shifting whims of consumers.

Pursing a direction or vision in a fast changing, complex business is like being in a boat race where the destination is constantly shifting, where competitors are trying to sink your boat or conniving to outwit you with multiple unknown factors that you can't anticipate.

How do modern CEOs show leadership in the midst of so much ambiguity and rapid change? Everyone recognizes that identifying a concrete direction is getting harder and harder This is why many CEO visions are little more than vague motherhood statements.

Writers like Henry Mintzberg talk about emergent strategy. Where it is hard to be definitive about where to go in advance of starting a journey, we must let strategy emerge en route.

So-called learning organizations learn by experimenting with new products and services, only deciding what direction to pursue based on what works and adapting entrepreneurially. The bottom line is that direction in complex, fast changing contexts often must be discovered through trial and error, by feeling our way, rather than decided definitively in advance.

But if CEOs struggle to offer concrete direction then we have two choices: (1) we can say that they no longer provide all of the leadership that an organization needs or (2) we can change our definition of leadership so that providing direction is not so central.

Guess what? Thanks to our deep need to regard CEOs as leaders, we have chosen the second option. Leadership is now widely regarded as a facilitative, enabling function that encourages employees to find their own direction or help the organization find one. For example, level 5 leaders draw ideas for new directions out of team members rather than providing it themselves. But we need to consider the possibility that choosing this option abandons the real potential that leadership has to offer, just when we need it more than ever.

Back to basics leadership

Suppose we choose the first option, that a CEO no longer provides all the direction an organization needs. Thus all employees can show leadership, not just to team members, but to the whole business when they promote a better way. The crucial difference is that employees can only influence the organization's direction, not decide it.

We can still say that we need CEOs to keep the ship afloat in the storm, help us keep our spirits up and encourage us to give our best. But this is not really leadership, but management suitably upgraded to be an engaging, supportive, nurturing, coaching function¹. This is what we want CEOs to do; we just need to stop calling it leadership.

Thus providing direction is still the core meaning of leadership but CEOs can only provide some of it as it can also be provided by other employees where the meaning of leadership shifts from deciding new directions to influencing others to accept a better way.

Innovation is a critical source of new directions. It was once always done in-house, but today, some businesses are either outsourcing innovation or simply looking for new ideas wherever they can find them, recognizing how hard it is to generate new directions from one source.

Providing direction, as pure influence independent of role, means showing the way for others either by example or by explicitly promoting a better way. The latter is what Martin Luther King was doing when he campaigned for justice for African Americans. Green leaders who promote a better way could have a leadership impact on communities all around the globe. When a front-line innovator promotes a new product to management, leadership has been shown bottom-up.

Such leadership shown by outsiders or bottom-up does not entail occupying a role, being a certain type of person or using positional authority to make decisions for the group. It simply influences us to accept a new direction. This is the leadership that innovation-driven businesses need. It sells the tickets for the journey, not take us to the destination. We need to get there ourselves or with the help of facilitators and coaches operating as managers upgraded.

Showing the way for others

If leadership simply means convincing others to take a trip they wouldn't otherwise take, then all the usual traits required of leaders are situational. This is why a front-line innovator with zero emotional intelligence might be able to convince management to adopt a new product.

CEOs and other managers need to be emotionally intelligent, but showing leadership only requires it in certain situations. It is just one type of influencing skill or tactic. Where the content of a new idea is sufficiently compelling or can be backed by hard evidence, it doesn't matter what the person who is promoting it is like. Here, content trumps style.

This is like the fireman pointing to the exit in a burning building. We don't care if he has zero charisma because he knows what direction to pursue. Also, this is an isolated act of following which does not amount to joining a group headed by the fireman. He simply shows leadership without being our leader in an ongoing, role-based sense.

Implications of reframing leadership

While focusing on leadership as influencing new directions takes us back to the basics, this move has huge implications. It means giving up the idea that being a leader means being in charge of a group. We can maintain this fiction in simple groups like street gangs and politics, but not in complex, fast changing businesses. The only way  that leadership can come from outside the organization or bottom up is if it stops short of execution which must be a separate, managerial phase.

From Statics to Dynamics

This discussion has shifted from person to process. We started talking about the ideal person to be a leader where leadership is an internal, top-down, static role. With this concept of leadership in mind, we talk about style rather than content - which is why direction has been supplanted by how the leader behaves, the need to be a certain sort of person.

But switching the emphasis back to direction (content) has huge implications because new content can clearly come from anywhere. Consider Microsoft. They copied Apple's graphical user interface when they shifted from DOS to Windows. Later they followed Netscape by introducing Internet Explorer and Google's focus on search and now the introduction of web services - putting applications on line instead of just selling software.

Microsoft has thus regularly followed the lead of competitors. Such leadership is clearly neither a person nor a role. Rather, leadership-as-influence is fragmented into discrete impacts that induce a change in direction and which can come from outside or bottom-up..

We often say that leadership is an influence process but all influence works the same way. Compare leading to selling which can also be a discrete, one-off act of influence, not an ongoing role. You can influence your colleagues, even in different organizations, without being in any kind of role in relation to them.

In our postmodern world there are no longer any ultimate authorities. Positional leadership suited the industrial age of static hierarchy. But today leadership has become fragmented into discrete acts and impacts that can come from anywhere. This is a massive change of perspective but essential for any innovation-driven business that wants to capitalize on the full potential of emerging forms of leadership. Such leadership can only influence us to think or act differently. It can't make decisions for us, look after us or take us on any journeys.

It is time to give up the myth of the "ideal leader." Leadership is not a role or type of person.

Whither our ideals?

Changing the focus of leadership to place more emphasis on the needs of the business than on our needs to achieve our dreams or to identify with admirable people doesn't mean we have to sacrifice our dreams. Our ideal leader just becomes our ideal chief executive. With so much power, this is an important role. We just need to see that the chief executive can only show leadership rather than be a leader.

It's not just that we should stop calling CEOs leaders; we should stop talking about leaders altogether, at least in large complex businesses. Instead we should talk about discrete acts of leadership, about showing leadership instead of being a leader.

This article is a substantially re-written version of Your Ideal Leader. See also Leadership and Management Reinvented, Creative Class Leadership, Showing Leadership and Beyond Folk Leadership. The latter article directly questions the notion that leadership means being a certain type of person in charge of a group.