In an interview in 1991, the Nobel Prize-winning author Laurens Van der Post proclaimed that the era of leaders is over (Block, 1998). A decade later, the topic of breakthrough leadership was the subject of the first special issue in the Harvard Business Review’s seventy-nine year history. Leadership has endured as a consuming issue in both personal and organizational life since Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince was written in 1513. In truth, however, leadership exists as part of a duality: Leaders forge and sustain relationships with followers (Goffee
& Jones, 2001). Strikingly, Hitler sensed this duality. In a speech to his personal guard corps, he exclaimed: “All that you are, you are through me; all that I am, I am through you alone” (Kellerman, 2001, p. 21).
Citizenship defines followers’ capacity to create for themselves what they have traditionally expected their leaders to accomplish. Moreover, it is the “agreement to receive rights and privileges from the community” in return for living within certain boundaries and “acting in the interest of the whole” (Block, 1998, p. 90). Henry Rosovksy, former dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard University, declared that “when it concerns our most important obligations – faculty citizenship – neither rule nor custom is any longer compelling” (Braskamp & Ory, 1994, p. 10).
Relatedly, he intimated that perhaps it is time for faculty members to rethink their association with the academy. At Winona State University, the impetus for rethinking and renewing faculty leadership, followership, and citizenship roles
has been a collective commitment to “community as the organizing principle”
(Bowman, 1999, p. 24).
What is a leader, anyway? What is it that impactful leaders do? What are their most important tasks? How do leaders win the respect and allegiance of followers?
If there are established principles of leadership, are there also acknowledged principles of followership? Specifically, what is it that followers want and need from leaders? And how does one create a culture of citizenship dedicated to caring for the well-being of the larger institution? Does rediscovering citizenship begin, for example, with paying special attention to the way we come together – the way that we convene? Finally, does the workplace have the “potential to be the place where community is revived and common purpose is reawakened?”
(Block, 1998, p. 92).
Elements of Leadership
Anthropologist Lionel Tiger (“All in a day’s work,” 2001) has observed that “all primate groups create – cannot exist without – leaders” (p. 57). Without a leader, the “group’s energy is spent on internal jockeying for dominance,” (p. 57) with real work left undone. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud
“suggests that groups of any kind depend on a leader, even one weak and flawed, for their identity and sense of purpose” (Kellerman, 2001, p. 17). As leaders, the character traits of those who have occupied the Oval Office have truly been a deck of cards. Whether Washington, Lincoln, Nixon, Clinton, or Bush, we still tend to organize our perceptions of the country’s interests and business around those individuals, “even though we may judge them ineffectual or unworthy”
(Kellerman, p. 17).
Fundamentally, leadership is personal. It is a “personal quest, one that can produce blazing triumphs even as it plunges the leader into the darkest, most mys- terious reaches of the self” (Collingwood, 2001, p. 8). One of the legendary titans of American enterprise, George Eastman, the father of mass-market photography, penned a dark suicide note that read: “To my friends: My work is done – why wait?” (Tedlow, 2001, p. 78). Socrates argued that the “unexamined life is not worth living.” Exceptional leaders honor that haunting summons to examine what animates one inwardly.Parker Palmer (2001)contended that an inner journey was a prerequisite to authentic leadership. Moreover, he exclaims that the examined life – one rich in inner awareness – is an essential source of leadership strength.
Relatedly, he observes that “in our time, we’ve seen the impact of people like Nel- son Mandela, Rosa Parks, and Vaclav Havel, who have found the courage to lead from their own deepest truths” (Palmer, p. 26). Thus, before vision and mission
and strategy comes self-knowledge. Exceptional leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. not only view themselves as life-size but also are equally adept at enabling self-knowledge in others.
During a brainstorming exercise in the Department of Education at Winona State, faculty members identified more than fifty discrete roles and leadership demands central to key aspects of the Department’s daily operations (Bowman, 2002). Philosophically, colleagues spoke with one voice: Leadership is everyone’s responsibility. In a culture of dispersed leadership, the real work of academic leaders begins with inviting probing questions that uncover problems that can threaten the very existence of the organization. Cross-examining reality, more- over, demands an uncommon courage of both leader and follower. Politically, interrogating reality demands giving voices to colleagues and students by listening to their stories and songs.
Importantly, the real work of faculty leaders involves inviting and orchestrating the very penetrating, perceptive, probing questions that often give rise to the tension, dissent, and constructive stress that are essential to defining reality and creating positive organizational change (Bowman, 1999). Impact leaders recognize the “cost of insights unshared and constructive criticism unspoken”
(Heenan & Bennis, 1999, p. 300). Treating constructive conflict as a vital resource for organizational learning circumscribes the real work of faculty leaders in a culture of restless self-renewal.
Academic chairs function as leaders when they focus relentlessly on key aspects of organizational culture: mission, vision, engagement, and adaptability (Bowman, 2002). Mission pinpoints the department’s purpose and direction, its reason for existence. Vision represents what a department strives to be, its aspirations, its ambitions. Adaptability mirrors colleagues’ ability to embrace
“common purpose” in responding to changing workplace demands. There is, however, a distinctive difference between being a department with a vision and a mission and being a visionary organization. That difference lies in creating alignment. The real work of academic leaders centers on creating and sustaining an alignment that preserves an organization’s values, reinforces its mission, stimulates progress toward it aspirations, and invites and affirms colleagues’
engaged contributions in pursuit of mission and vision (Collins & Porras, 1997).
In my daily work with student teachers, there is a heightened fascination with the construct of teacher as leader. Initially, student teachers experience intrusive thoughts and infectious anxieties related to “managing student behavior.” Within a few weeks, however, developing student teachers shifts focus from managing students’ behavior to “managing students’ instructional interactions.” As the end of the student teaching draws near, one or more of the student teachers will wondrously begin to “amplify student interactions.” The tipping point occurs when
“learning replaces instruction, participation replaces presentation, and questions become more important than answers” (Block, p. 88). As teacher as leader, the commitment is no longer that of controlling energy in others or even in managing energy in others but rather releasing creative, combustible energy in others.
Finally, peeling the leadership onion reveals that leadership is a “multifaceted and nuanced capability,” much of which appears “hardwired in people before they reach their early or mid-twenties” (Sorcher & Brant, 2002, p. 83). Admittedly, there is far more interest in leadership than there is agreement upon just what it is. In fact, what strikes preeminent leadership scholars like Warren Bennis is how difficult it is to describe anyone’s leadership. Pointedly,Bennis (2002)contends that “leadership is not a science. It’s not a recipe. It’s not the five rules about this or the six effective habits of that. It is an art, and as Georges Braque wrote, ‘The only thing that matters in art is the part that can’t be explained’ ” (p. 98). In the deepest sense, leadership represents our collective best efforts to understand and respond to the inexplicable in our midst.
Elements of Followership
It is axiomatic that one cannot be a leader without followers. Like leadership, followership is deeply personal. The sociological and psychological literature on the follower’s experience “tells us that people seek, admire, and respect – that is, they follow – leaders who produce within them three emotional responses” (Goffee
& Jones, 2002, p. 148).
The first emotional response is a feeling of significance. Colleagues seek to be appreciated and affirmed for a job well done, not just through formal recognition programs but also informally through little things like hand-written notes, positive voice-mail, and e-mail messages. In truth, every communication offers a chance to recognize and affirm colleagues’ value to the organization (Nelson, 2002).
Recently, the State of Minnesota witnessed the largest state workers’ strike in Minnesota history. Dozens of Winona State office workers and maintenance workers walked the picket lines in full ferment. Administrative leaders across the campus ventured out to the picket lines, assuring workers that they understood workers’ needs, appreciated their contributions to the University, and had workers’
best interests at heart, by not hiring much-needed replacements from outside the union’s ranks.Kouzes and Posner (1995)note that while titles are granted, it’s your behavior that wins you respect, loyalty, and followership.
The second emotional response that followers want from their leaders is a feeling of community. Goffee and Jones (2001) contend that “community occurs when people feel a unity of purpose around work, and simultaneously, a
willingness to relate to each other as human beings” (p. 148). Faculty members in the Winona State Department of Education share a deeply-embedded belief that the defining elements of community are “perceived interdependence” and
“generosity” (Pinchot, 1998, p. 44). In fact, those beliefs were implicit in the Department’s recent invitation to the University President, Vice-President, and Dean of the College of Education to join faculty members in two hours of “dialogue as inquiry” regarding a perplexing programmatic issue. Briefly, the administration’s acceptance and subsequent participation in that dialogue signaled a powerful, public caring about the consequences of colleagues’ work.
Importantly, that public caring functioned as a “foundation of community”
(Pinchot, p. 44). Generosity is another of the defining principles of community.
The administration’s participation allowed faculty to sense that generosity palpably. When a feeling of community is “successfully engineered, it is so deeply gratifying that followers will call the person who created it their leader” (Goffee &
Jones, 2001, p. 148.)
Thirdly, “followers will tell you that a leader is nearby when they get a buzzing feeling” (Goffe & Jones, p. 148). That feeling is triggered by a leader’s orientation toward the inexorability of tomorrow (“All in a day,” 2001, p. 56). In a phrase, followers respond to the gravitational pull of a department, school system, or university in which the future is actively under construction.
Freud believed that the “primal need to follow grows out of the infant’s need for care and protection” and “ ‘the longing for the father that lives in each of us from our childhood days’ ” (Kellerman, 2001, p. 20). While followership implies need and commitment, that commitment is never without conditions. The follower demands that the leader create feelings of significance, community, and excitement.
Elements of Citizenship
An exploration of the elements of citizenship unearths the collective need to be accountable for the well being of both the larger institution and society. Too often in the past, accountability was entrusted only to those in positions of authority.
Block (1998) asserts that “one reason we seek leadership and lose faith in the principle of self-governing systems is that we live in a culture of entitlement”
(p. 90). From the public perspective, there is an aura of narcissistic entitlement in higher education. Faculty members genuflect at the altar of academic freedom, wield their union contracts with religious fervor, pay homage to rank and tenure, and view office hours as something akin to penance. To the uninitiated public, there
is scant evidence of a faculty willing to give up territory. Moreover, to the degree that narcissistic entitlement constitutes claiming rights without full payment, it threatens and destroys institutions and community. In contrast, “citizenship is accountability that is chosen” (Block, 1998, p. 90). It is a responsibility for the common good which is self-inflicted.
Block argues compellingly that “citizenship, self-management, and engagement come together when we collectively learn to rethink and redesign the place where we assemble” (p. 94). In the Winona State Department of Education, colleagues are experimenting with a community structure that has been christened “The Faculty Forum” (Bowman, 1999). The bimonthly forum is clearly distinct from regularly scheduled faculty meetings. In important ways, the two structures reveal the characteristics of both traditional and emerging workplaces. The Faculty Forum draws upon community as the organizing metaphor. Implicitly, forums confront colleagues with four questions: “Who am I? What am I a part of? What connects me to the rest of the world? What relationships matter to me?” (Bressler
& Grantham, 2000, p. 161). Because Roberts’ Rules of Order are not honored formally in The Faculty Forums, colleagues are characteristically able to value tension and manage constructive stress across weeks of dialogue and debate on particularly contentious issues. In those instances, there is a sustained, shared sense of a collective good-faith search for common ground among powerful equals. The attending sensitivities and behaviors of openness, inclusiveness, trust, engagement, and creative collaboration reflect a commitment to common cause, communal success, and faculty citizenship.
Max DePree (1992) has described leadership as “serious meddling in other peoples’ lives” (p. 17). If we are committed as faculty to meddling seriously in the lives of students and colleagues in a spirit of servant-leadership, we should do so with the conscious intent that those served become healthier, wiser, freer, and more autonomous (Greenleaf, 1977). Secondly, followership can be tracked along two continua. The first runs from uncritical, dependent thinking to critical, independent thinking. The second runs from passive engagement to active engagement. Those who are at the high end of each scale are exemplary followers. The growing demands of organizational life today require higher and higher levels of critical, independent thinking and active engagement – what Robert Kelly (1998)has defined as exemplary followership. Thirdly, citizenship takes form and is lived out in community when colleagues reclaim choice for themselves and others. At its core, citizenship involves creating and sustaining relationships around a shared sense of purpose and accountability for the whole.
Thus, leadership, followership, and citizenship all involve processes of inner growth followed by outer organizational consequences.