Thus the interactive mode of leadership isn't simply about being emotionally intelligent; it's about acting with emotional intelligence. If you are emotionally intelligent only in your thoughts while you remain in the traditional management mode of controlling, regulating, and optimizing, then you are unlikely to be successful in engaging the emotions of others. It is generally through narrative that you activate passion and channel the passion in others for constructive purposes. To achieve the proper balance inherent in “well-targeted and well-deployed emotion,” you also need to avoid being too much in love with order.
Leadership That Avoids “Apollo Run Amok”
Now that Apollonian culture, along with its attendant control mode of management, is everywhere triumphant, the modern workplace often feels as though it has fallen head over heels in love with order. Earlier in this chapter, I discussed the reasons that the Apollonian culture emerged as a result of the forces of bigness and consistency. In fact, the control mode sets out with the best of intentions—that of establishing order out of the potential chaos into which large organizations would otherwise tumble.
But when the love of order becomes extreme, it can undermine the very condition of harmony that it is trying to achieve. The ancient Greeks recognized the phenomenon and—as usual—encapsulated it in a story: the myth of Apollo and Daphne:
Apollo was the god of order and light. He helped ripen crops, destroy pests, and heal illnesses. He was a shepherd god and protected flocks. He was also a builder and the god of colonies and of oracles, and the deity of beauty and music. He was usually depicted as a beardless young man of handsome proportions, and he was often shown with a bow and quiver.
One day in the forest, Apollo saw a beautiful young maiden, Daphne, and fell in love with her. She, however, hated the thought of loving anyone. Her delight was in woodland sports and the spoils of the chase. Many lovers had sought her, but she had rejected them all.
When Apollo saw her hair flung loose over her shoulders, he thought, “If it's as charming as this in disorder, what would it be like if it was arranged?” She rejected his advances, and so he chased her through the woods. She fled, running swifter than the wind.
Even as she continued her flight, Apollo fell even more deeply in love. The wind blew her garments and her unbound hair streamed loose behind her. Apollo grew impatient to catch up with her and picked up the pace.
As he gained on her, he got so close that his panting breath blew on her hair. In her desperation, she called on her father, the river god, to save her. Scarcely had she spoken when a stiffness seized all her limbs. Her breasts were enclosed in a tender bark. Her hair became leaves and her arms branches. Her feet were stuck fast in the ground as roots. Her face became a treetop, retaining nothing of her former self except her beauty. Apollo stood amazed at the transformation.27
The myth offers a clue as to the proper balance between passion and order. Excessive pursuit of something can lead to its petrification. In the process of striving for order, you can destroy the very thing you love. The end result for the object of Apollonian attentions is not necessarily death but rather a vegetable state that closely resembles it. The victims of the excess are unable to move. They stay rooted to the ground, immobile.
In the nineteenth century, the idea arose in the writings of Nietzsche that society needed to choose between rules and order on one hand and drunken irrationality on the other. If that were the choice today, it's obvious that anyone would choose the former.
But this isn't the choice leaders of today are facing. It's not a choice between order and irrationality. The more important choice is between an approach of domination and control and one of participation and interaction. Rationality and order can be present in both modes. The question is whether the goal is an order that is subtle and dynamic, based on interactive engagement with others, or an order that is foreordained and sterile and based on command and control.
The ancient Greeks understood this rather better than traditional management. The Greek god Apollo was never an enemy of passion or narrative or interaction. In fact, Apollo was not only the god of order and light but also the god of music and beauty. Whatever the virtues of modern management, no one to date has suggested that they include music or beauty. So it's not Apollo with whom modern management has fallen in love, but rather a demonized version of Apollo, that is, Apollo run amok. We've got the order, but in establishing order, we've lost the music and the beauty.
Leadership That Includes Beauty
In fact, of all modern management's sins, one of the least recognized is its neglect of beauty. After all, life was once viewed as beautiful, even though it's hard to recall this when reading management books or looking at the working life of most people today. Wealth doesn't seem to help. As the economy advances, the workplace doesn't become less dreary, with its total focus on analysis, optimization, and the bottom line. If a glimmer of beauty accidentally occurs in a modern organizational setting, it's usually regarded as an embarrassment: it will be dealt with by a rhetoric that has no aesthetic sensitivity to begin with.28
But what use is a life of work if there isn't a scintilla of beauty within it? As work consumes more and more of people's waking hours, the systematic draining of beauty from their lives becomes an increasingly graver problem.
Narrative thus has one final contribution to make: restoring beauty to the workplace. With a well-turned phrase, an elegant telling, a story creates the shapeliness of the beginning, middle, and ending. Through the story's tensions and resolutions, both the teller and the audience experience continuing coherent existence. These elements can add beauty to lives that are otherwise bereft of it, like flowers making their way through the cracks in a vast cement pavement.29
By contrast, the control mode of management is deadening. You can recognize it in the gray feeling that comes over you when you participate in a departmental meeting, listening to the voice that drones on with announcements of “new findings” that could hardly be more banal, or of the latest reorganization that is so like the previous one, or the fatuous anodynes for managers in distress. These are stagnant waters in which no living thing flourishes.
The dreariness of the modern workplace has been attacked so often that it might seem a waste of time to criticize it further. Yet there are grounds for doing so. While the cause of its ugliness—the controlling approach to leadership—is deadly, it's not dead. Unfortunately, it's horrifyingly active and energetic, like a garrulous bore who won't stop talking. In fact it's this restless energy that suggests the possibility—and even the hope—of change.
For organizations that are run in the control mode, beauty currently has to steal back into departments by way of postcards pinned to cubicle walls, muttered jokes, underground discussions, hurried lunches, or clandestine romances, while management tries to redirect attention toward mounting a never-ending career ladder. The goal is to get people to focus on minuscule salary increments and relative enhancements of standing—a fancier title or a marginally larger workspace.
What is being offered here is an escape route from this mortuary by suggesting a type of leadership that includes meaning as well as beauty. Story responds to our human curiosity to know how the world is connected together and to our longing for shapely forms. We not only look for narrative patterns—we yearn for them. We want to know what happens and also that it will make sense. We suffer the hunger for meaning and cannot resist its satisfaction. Through story we experience the many levels of the self, as well as a deeper coherence of the world.30
Through story, we learn to see each other and ourselves, and come to love what we see as well as acquire the power to change it. In this way we come to terms with our past, our present, and our future.
Through story, we can put an end to the worry, the fever, and the fret of trying to live instrumentally. Finally, we can simply be.
Interactive Leadership: Its Relation to Other Leadership Theories
This chapter describes a kin
d of leadership that I have called an interactive leadership. It reflects an approach to leadership that includes the capacity to apply, with integrity and authenticity, the full set of narrative tools discussed in this book. In this kind of leadership, every person's perspective is taken into account, and yet an overall moral direction is also evident. This concept of leadership implies no hierarchical power. It sees a leader as someone who has followers, whether any formal authority supports the relationship. The leader may be someone at the top, the middle, or the bottom level of a hierarchy, someone who is aiming to achieve change in an organization—whether a business, a community, or a family. The question being addressed is, What behaviors enable one to acquire followers in pursuit of a cause, whatever the hierarchical situation?
Interactive leadership is contrasted to traditional command-and-control management, which reflects a reliance on hierarchical power and which represents the dominant approach to management today. It is characterized by boss-subordinate relationships, in which the leader is a supervisor who is assumed to have hierarchical power within an organization to hire, fire, reward or reprimand, promote or downgrade employees and allocate their responsibilities. Many of the studies assume this hierarchical relationship as the unstated context, which obviously has a huge influence on what happens, both positive (by way of getting subordinates' attention) and negative (by way of introducing a dimension of inequality that can hinder open dialogue and interactivity).
Both interactive and traditional modes of leading differ sharply from modes of operating based on manipulation and winning at all costs: demagogues, the spin artists whose activities were reviewed in Chapter Five, and the robber barons and hardball strategists discussed in Chapter Six. These people also use narrative techniques, but their narratives are grounded in deception and inauthenticity.
Categories of Leadership
How does the concept of interactive leadership relate to the vast literature on leadership? It's useful to look at the most frequently discussed categories:
Leadership as a trait: Early efforts to understand leadership focused on the possibility of enduring personality or character traits that people were born with and that enabled some to become great, but no such traits have been discovered.31 Although personality tests such as the Campbell Leadership Descriptor and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are used to assess leadership qualities, no trait has been consistently linked with superior leadership performance. Nor am I suggesting that the ability to tell a story is an innate trait. Some people may be naturally better at telling stories than others. But storytelling is something that all people already perform in a fashion and anyone can get better at.
Leadership as a skill: The concept of interactive leadership is consistent with the idea of leadership being a set of skills that can be learned. Robert Katz has suggested that leadership skills fall into three categories—technical, human, or intellectual.32 Technical includes the understanding of the subject matter dealt with by the organization. Human includes interpersonal skills and the ability to relate to the people being led. Intellectual includes the ability to understand, analyze, and see the implications of the relationships between potential actions and their consequences. In many leadership theories, the narrative skills of an interactive leader are a missing dimension of the human and intellectual categories. More research is needed on what is involved in upgrading the relevant narrative skills, but abundant anecdotal evidence already shows that they can be learned.
Leadership as a style: Another school of leadership research focuses on the behavior of leaders in terms of repeating patterns of behavior that may be either learned or innate. Blake and Mouton, for instance, developed a managerial grid with two dimensions: concern for results and concern for people.33 By plotting results on each axis, with scores ranging from 1 to 9, they identified five major leadership styles: authority-compliance (9,1), country club management (1,9), impoverished management (1,1), middle-of-the-road management (5,5) and team management (9,9). The grid is widely used, but despite a massive amount of research, no consistent link has been found between leadership styles and productivity.34 Of the various styles, interactive leadership has most in common with team management, where work is accomplished by committed people with a common stake in the outcome, which leads to relationships of trust and respect. Interactive leadership constitutes one particular way of achieving an outcome that combines high concern for both people and results.
Leadership as situational: The basic premise of this approach is that different situations demand different kinds of leadership. To be effective, a leader needs to adapt to the demands of the situation. Blanchard mapped behavior on two dimensions: directive behaviors and supportive behaviors.35 This leads to four leadership styles: delegating behavior (low supportive and low directive), supporting (high supportive and low directive), coaching (high directive and high supportive), and directing (high directive and low supportive). Much of the writing and research in this area deals with management rather than leadership, that is, with straightforward hierarchical situations of supervisors and their subordinates. And while the concept of interactive leadership put forward in this book is obviously highly situational—an interactive leader starts from the existing relationship with potential followers and goes from there—the two-dimensional model that Blanchard offers—supportive versus directive—lacks the conceptual subtlety necessary for understanding or dealing with the complex challenges of genuine leadership interactions that are not buttressed by hierarchical authority.
Leadership as motivation: The goal of this theory is to enhance employee performance and satisfaction by focusing on employee motivation. Different leadership behaviors are identified, including directive leadership (telling subordinates what to do), supportive leadership (helping subordinates get the job done), participative leadership (inviting subordinates to share in decision making), and achievement-oriented leadership (challenging subordinates to perform at high levels).36 Again, much of the writing and research in this area assumes that the leader has the hierarchical power to determine who gets to decide what, when that is precisely what is in question in the leadership challenges facing organizations today.
Leadership as transformation: Since the publication of James MacGregor Burns's Leadership in 1978, attention has shifted toward transformational leadership, which is concerned with emotions, values, ethics, standards, and long-term goals. It involves a process whereby an individual engages with others and creates a connection that raises the level of motivation and morality in both the leader and the follower. Transformational leadership is distinguished from transactional leadership, which focuses on exchanges and deals between leader and followers concerning incentives or disincentives that may be applied in return for an employee's performance; and laissez-faire leadership, which amounts to keeping hands off and letting things ride. Transformational leaders exhibit strong values and ideas and are effective at motivating followers to act in ways that support the overall good; they end up changing both themselves and their followers.37 Transformational leadership has much in common with the ideas put forward in this book. In fact, interactive leadership is a form of transformational leadership.
What Transformational Leaders Actually Do
The concept of interactive leadership addresses one of the fundamental problems of current theories of transformational leadership: their lack of conceptual clarity. Thus, in the literature to date, theories of transformational leadership tend to focus on traits or personal dispositions that lead to certain kinds of results. Robert Quinn's Deep Change sees transformational leadership as a process—as you grow as a person, so does your leadership.38 Leaders need to constantly be self-aware and to work to become the leader they aspire to be.
What is typically missing in these theories is a specification of what specific leadership behavior leads to what result. It is thus unclear exactly what transformational leaders actually do to achieve the results they are said to achieve. This makes it difficu
lt to validate the underlying ideas or to train people to become leaders. It isn't that these writers don't examine leaders' behavior: the problem is that current work in the area usually fails to examine the behavior of leaders in sufficiently fine granularity to identify what exactly is involved. In particular, it tends to overlook the narrative aspect of what is going on.39
The fact that narrative is a thread running through everything that a transformational leader does to achieve extraordinary results has thus received insufficient attention. How else could leaders provide succinct and appealing images of what is to be done, except by narrative? How else could leaders help people see meaning in their work except by story? How else could leaders communicate who they are or what their values are, except by narrative? How else could leaders share knowledge, tame the grapevine, or articulate a vision of the future, except by story?
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