The essence of the leadership job is the development of an enabling environment such that followers obtain relevant perspectives on their challenges. Consequently, through the creation of such contexts, the leader can use the followers’ potential to reach high-performance levels and propel the organization to its objective ideal. While leadership definition will border on distinct traits, the reality is that often a single leader combines these traits to create a particular leadership behavior. The common traits include post-heroic leadership, guru, transformational, behavioral, contingency, matrix, and charismatic. The transactional and transformational typologies of leadership are the dominant ones. The leadership framework consists of four components of leadership, namely visioning, relating, sense-making, and inventing, which are discussed later.
Effective leadership, which in many cases is transformative leadership, calls for a combination of wisdom, intelligence, and creativity; the leader is constantly making decisions on the right way of marshaling these resources. By using creativity, leaders generate ideas and then rely on intelligence to evaluate the suitability of the ideas to the present situation. At the same time, the leader would rely on practical intelligence to implement the idea. Wisdom comes in handy when the leader is balancing the interests of shareholders such that the leader’s actions lead to the common good. Although leaders can be creative and intelligent through education and apprenticeship, wisdom is often hard to acquire. Wisdom in the leadership sense corresponds with the successful use of creativity, intelligence, and knowledge to realize a range of results such as common good, balance of extra personal, inter-personal and intrapersonal interests, considering short term and long-term needs, and finally adapting to or shaping and selecting environments.
Wisdom in a leader leaves a mark on the followers. At the same time, the lack of wisdom is often a common characteristic of unsuccessful leaders, who in most cases succumb to fallacies of thoughts that border on foolishness. In the first case of leadership fallacy, the leader develops an unrealistic optimism to think of themselves as very smart and effective such that they can accomplish and do whatever they want. The second case of fallacy relates to egotism where successful leaders embrace a sense of importance and no one else and they attribute their importance to their past success. There is also the omniscience fallacy where leaders forget that they do not know everything and should consult. Sometimes leaders will exhibit a lack of wisdom by being under an invulnerability fallacy; thinking that they can get away with any decision they make because of their status. Yet, another fallacy for leadership is moral disengagement, which corresponds with the changes in the leader’s view of their leadership from moral terms to convenient terms only.
Howell Raines failed because he developed unrealistic optimism based on his first success with the New York Time’s coverage of 9/11. Omniscience was also a cause for problems as evident in the way Raines preferred to handpick candidates for editorial positions and stories for the front page when this would certainly be an editor’s board decision. The problem became worse when he declined to attend meetings because he did not want exposure to mundane ideas, as he referred to the opinions of his subordinates. These problems corresponded with Raine’s mistakes of wanting to solve the newspaper’s woes in a transactional way, yet the problems were non-rational as explained in the following paragraph.
One of the biggest failures of leaders arises when they treat adaptive challenges as technical challenges. Unlike technical challenges that are easy to identify and can often be solved by authority or experts, adaptive challenges require changes in beliefs, values, relationships, and approaches to work. They will call for changes in various organization places. People’s resistance characterizes them even after acknowledgment. In some cases, their solutions will require experiments or discoveries. Technical challenges call for transactional management interventions, while adaptive challenges will only be solved with a new way of thinking. Adaptive challenges may appear as successive routine challenges that force managers to embrace very dynamic transactional strategies to deal with emergent problems in their organizations. Unfortunately, for many managers in leadership positions, the transactional approaches fail to address adaptive challenges, and the person’s concerned resort to blame circumstances and people tasked with the particular initiative.
Given that there are so many characteristics to define leaders, it is apparent that coming up with a universal leadership definition based on characteristics and behavior alone is not enough. Nevertheless, leadership still matters and plays a crucial role in problem-solving. An organization can typically perform its duties by relying on the traditional leadership model, but it will soon be in trouble that requires a new view and role of leadership. The only way to solve problems and achieve sustained change in organizations is by thinking differently, which happens through leadership.
The new view of leadership is that it is not just a thing that affects followers; rather, followers also contribute to and shape leadership. Followers have the power to prevent bad leadership. Similarly, bad leaders can find themselves without followers and lose the ability to lead. The distributive leadership model goes beyond the realization that followers have an influence on leadership and explores interactions among individuals to bring out incidences of leadership. Under the distributed leadership model, human cognition occurs between individuals, while the social context also plays a part.
The cognitive activity stretches between the individuals to reflect the context they are in. In this sense, context is not static and does not merely correspond with the state at which individuals act. Here, context refers to a whole stretch covering the human actors and their particular stage of acting. Context is part of the meaning-making and it emerges according to the engagement of complex tasks. On the other hand, individuals make sense based on their mental capacity and the enabling features of the context. In the distribution model, situations go beyond contingency descriptions. The situation and objects in that particular situation are not passive recipients of actions by leaders. According to the distributed leadership model, organization routines such as the 10.30 am meeting in the New York Times case actively constitute and shape leadership practices in a reciprocal relationship.
Distributed leadership can arise on a purely numeric dimension where the aggregate attributed influence in a group influences its distributed leadership. On the other hand, the effects of distributed leadership could occur in a concert form, where leadership is realized through synergies created by joint action. In the concert form of distributed leadership, people engage in spontaneous collaboration, there is an intuitive working relationship, and various practices are institutionalized. The NYT case presents an example of possible distributed leadership at work, with the executive editor being the overall leader and desk editors and other editors or head reporters also contributing to the leadership both through their institutionalized role in the newspaper and their express collaborative efforts as the editorial team.
In reality, some entities remain stable and casually relate to each other. These entities go on to become the parameter for analyzing distributed leadership. In the relational-entity approach of distributed leadership, the entities would correspond with leaders, followers, styles, attributes, competencies and so on, all described as nouns. The relational-entity approach observes the knowing mind of the leaders and the cognitive process happening between the minds and within the minds. An alternative form of looking at the distributed leadership model is through the relational-structure approach.
Here, individuals are nodes and the existence of an actor creates an ego. The focus is on the systems of relations among the nodes (people) and not on the particulars of the node. When there are centralities in the nodes, they correspond with the distribution of leadership. Looking at the NYT case through the relational-structure sense brings out the desk editors and section heads of the newspaper as nodes with ‘ego’ characteristics, given that other people converge their relationships to the few staffs and then they all converge at Howell Raine’s like the executive editor at the newspaper. The networks among people are cognitive structures. At the same time, they shape the leadership in the organization. In essence, the leader would only be effective after acknowledging and being accurate in the perception of the existence, nature, and structure of social ties within the organization, a feature that Howell Raines failed at doing. Consequently, he was unable to extract social capital from the organization network, which would have enabled him to make better decisions concerning the direction of the editorial content of the paper.
Other relational approaches to distributed leadership are processual, which focus on the way interpersonal relationships develop and maintain or dissolve about widely formed realities. The other is the systemic perspective that concerns a view of the environment where a team operates. Beyond relating, other capacities of distributed leadership are sense-making, which focuses on making sense of the world around us, and inventing, which focuses on designing new ways of working together to realize a goal. An important dimension of distributed leadership worth highlighting just like relating is visioning. Vision is the creation of a compelling image of the future by the leader. Visions give people motivation to give up their current views.
Howell Raines did not create a compelling vision for NYT when he suggested that a fast-paced and authoritative approach would eventually weed out non-performance and make the newspaper a high performing organization. While the prospects excited the leader, they failed to excite followers, whose participation or non-participation eventually affected the leadership effectiveness. The “Times” already had a compelling vision to emerge as a carefully assembled packet of information that was undecided about how it traveled. Therefore, from the onset, the content would be the focal point, which means that the people bringing in the content would be the most important for realizing the vision. Those responsible for mishandling vision at the “Times” would be the executive editor and the persons who worked directly with him, such as the managing editor and the CEO of the company.