Challenging Orthodoxy - The Harvard Business Review on Leadership

The Harvard Business Review's collection of articles on leadership is a highly respected source of information about the meaning of leadership. But how up to date is it? Two articles that seem rather dated are those by Abraham Zaleznik, originally published in 1977 and the one by John Kotter, first published in 1990. Although Kotter's article is not quite so old, most of his thinking on leadership dates from the late 70's and early 80's - a similar period to Zaleznik.

The main problem with Zaleznik's article is that he attacks management for being controlling and bureaucratic. His claims were lapped up in the late 70's and early 80's because the U.S. was reeling from the blow of the first wave of Japanese competition and they needed a scapegoat to blame. Management got fingered for this role, leading to the call to replace managers with leaders. This was a mistake. We simply need to upgrade management to make it a more empowering, coaching, facilitative function.

Kotter's efforts to distinguish leadership from management were admirable but he has one foot in the past. He rightly says that leadership has something to do with promoting change while management focuses on today's operations. But he builds in an older tradition of saying that leaders are inspirational while managers are not. This is a mistake for the simple reason that it is possible to show leadership with a wide range of styles. The whole effort to define leadership in style or personality terms is a dead end.

We need to move beyond Zaleznik and Kotter and say that leadership and management serve different but equally useful functions - leadership to promote new directions, management to execute them. In performing its role, management can be just as inspiring, concerned for people, transformational and empowering as it needs to be when there is a requirement to motivate employees to achieve challenging targets.

Why is this important? Because of the centrality of innovation. Leadership now needs to be based on the power of new ideas, not the power of position or personality. Innovation can come from anywhere and be directed upwards in the form of bottom-up leadership as well as downwards. The key point about bottom-up leadership is that it has nothing to do with managing people to get things done. It is nothing but the promotion of a new direction. Leadership cannot, therefore, be defined so as to imply being in charge of people. This is a counterintuitive conclusion.

Click here for a fuller discussion on how we need to challenge the orthodox views of Zaleznik and Kotter as promoted by the Harvard Business Review.