The Politics of Leadership

Product Information

So, what does it mean to be a leader? Dwight D. Eisenhower gives a more straightforward definition of leadership and its relation to influence: “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” What Leadership Is Not

That is why it becomes so important to think about how to help leaders get out of that model. Otherwise, it is very difficult to maintain a connection from that place to a society that lives in another time and in another world. Who Takes Care of Political Leaders? Our team has been working on a difficult problem for the past week. As a team leader, I believe the group is reasonably aware of the situation's problems. I tell them I'm confident they'll find a solution and encourage them to keep coming up with new ideas. Which adaptive leadership behaviour am I most likely to use? What we digitally consume on our cell phones (or through other screens), both in quantity and quality, affects us mentally and emotionally. Given the addictive nature of digital platforms, we are very exposed to consuming a poor-quality digital diet, investing hours of the day on them. It is difficult to imagine two concepts more abstract and illusive than leadership and politics, yet we must deal with each and join them in productive and parsimonious ways if a conceptual basis for theoretical development is to be established. A start may be made by restating a defining conceptualization of politics and then proceeding to construct a conceptualization of leadership on that foundation. David Easton’s now classic definition of politics may be taken as starting point. Easton proposed what became a landmark definition of politics in asserting that “politics is that social process through which values are authoritatively allocated for a political system” (Easton 1971, 143-44). That definition has been criticized for being too “system oriented” in that it fixes the processes in question in the working of established, sovereign, governmental systems. Much of that criticism can be met by broadening the concept to consider politics as a generic phenomenon that occurs within all social structures or systems, however informal. As Adrian Leftwich put it, “the fact of the matter is that, unless one adopts a very narrow view of it, politics is a pervasive feature of collective human life” (Leftwich 1990, 3). One fundamental proposition here is that leaders emerge (that is, leadership processes are engaged) in a decision incident resulting from conflict within the social set.In both groupings, there is leadership and there is a support structure. They are not always successful, but almost always when they are not, it is because there isn’t an appropriate distribution of responsibilities and revenues. Scientifically speaking, EI is a predictor of professional success. Studies conducted by TalentSmart® found 90 percent of high performers at work have a high emotional quotient (EQ measures EI). The good news is, unlike a person’s intelligence quotient (IQ), EQ can grow over time. For more information on growing your EI, start with Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence. Devote Time to Learning and Teaching Marcos Pe ña is an independent consultant with the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

The exercise of thinking about a leadership career in a different way from that of the classic ascension on the ladder of power helps us visualize the importance of having a shatterproof strategy, of taking care of oneself more, and of keeping perspective—so as not to go blind into a career without knowing the next steps, or so as not to become dependent on structures that end up squelching our enthusiasm, leaving us wondering why we do what we do. Clearly, any effort to understand leadership faces daunting problems. Both the virtue and the vice in the way of thinking which has been suggested in this article lies in its generally objective attitude; it does not immediately help us to discover the secrets of how to lead but it may hold some promise for helping us to see why and how all leadership processes take form and, thus, allow us to ask better questions. Hopefully, it will help bring leadership study more prominently into the range of vision of social and political scientists. Of those political scientists who do study and write about leadership most are constrained by disciplinary predilection to focus on leadership as elite behavior within established institutional frameworks such as the American presidency. Few approach leadership, as I will do here, as a political process occurring within human societies at all levels and in almost all (if not all) forms of society. Many recognize that leadership often involves political characteristics, and, certainly, eminent political scientists have focused on leadership as a critical element in the success or failure of governmental office holders, party officials, and the like. Scholars in other disciplines conclude much the same thing in their studies of nongovernmental leaders, but no one has unambiguously argued, as I propose to do here, that the conceptualization of leadership may be redirected and refined with recognition that politics is the central, common element in all leadership.Understanding the world of sports provides insight into what it takes to perform at the highest levels, even in other fields. Looking at the political experience from the person’s perspective—the individual’s perspective—and not just from the ideological, intellectual, or institutional perspective allowed me to see that there were many tools available that were not being leveraged and that could be very useful. I also saw that there were new realities that required new approaches. If we do not prepare and support our leaders, we cannot expect to have good results. One must wonder why there is so much investment, technology, and science devoted to training and caring for people who are dedicated to other tasks that have much less impact on our society, but we do not do the same with the people who take on the task of political leadership. Here I will borrow an old idea well expressed by Karl Deutsch (1980, 134-38) in the notion that the boundaries of a political system can be identified in terms of frequencies of transaction. A social group, and its attendant internal political process) can be identified in terms of the relative frequency of transactions as among one set of actors and another set identified by the same means. Thus, membership in a group is enacted by the behavior of a set of actors in terms of each other. In this way, the effective boundary of a group might be established by comparing the distributions of frequencies of transaction among individuals or, potentially, among sets of groups since small groups are subsystems of larger social systems. Nevertheless, it may be that the appropriate place to begin leadership study is at the level of small groups wherein the frequency of transactions is sufficiently high to provide a discernible boundary and the pattern of those interactions reveal a leadership process. This paper seeks to make an effective contribution to how we think about democratic political leadership and also to share personal insight as a politician so that other politicians and leaders can use it as a reference and think about how much they are taking care of themselves. Doing so can contribute to finding solutions for the legitimacy crisis that our democracies are experiencing due to a disconnect with social expectations and demands. This paradigm shift is already occurring in other fields of society, and taking it to the political arena will make the task of those in charge of solving the great problems we face more effective. Neuroscience has advanced in recent decades, and it can provide us with important self-awareness tools to know how our brain works, how it interacts with the rest of our body, and how it is affected by the stress context in which we move.

The support of doctors, nutritionists, physical trainers, kinesiologists, and other specialties is important if one wants to avoid voluntarism and wants to take advantage of scientific knowledge and advances that continue to develop. With few notable exceptions, such as James MacGregor Burns’s Leadership (1978), attempts to pursue an explicit understanding of the political nature of leadership have been conspicuously absent from the literature. Effectively, Bums saw leadership as a sociopolitical process enacted by individuals in interaction with others, but even he seemed focused on leadership in public politics rather than on the politics in leadership. (Or at least, Bums seems to have been convinced that the most meaningful forms of leadership are those that operate at the highest levels of public politics.) Clearly, leadership must be understood to involve more than the exercise of formal authority. It must also be understood as a critical element in the process by which authority is both created and sustained (Weaver 1991, 161). The “office holder” may not be the locus of leadership in a social structure. A concern with leadership qua power and authority in formal organizations effectively diverts attention from the structures and processes of informal power and authority and, therefore, leadership within those organizations or in other social structures (Weaver 1991, 162). Leadership must involve more than performing an office; it must define and be defined “by virtue of intricate reciprocities of behavior and perceptions” (Weaver 1991, 162). 1 will repeat here a position that I have made before that “leadership is a generically political role that has something important to do with initiative in the definition, articulation, and/or authoritative allocation of values in any social construct” (Weaver 1991,162) . An old, apocryphal riddle asks “What is the difference between a politician and a statesman?” and is answered with the observation that “a statesman is a politician with whom one agrees.” So too, with most students of leadership, “a nonleader is anyone who acts the same as a leader except that we disagree with her or him in some significant way.” Politicians often receive specific training on expression or rhetorical techniques for going up on stage to give a speech or going on a television interview. This is based on the premise that a leader goes on stage a few times a day or a week, and then “turns off” the communication mode to continue with their rational tasks. But today, the political leader is in permanent communication mode—always exposed—and for that, he needs to prepare differently.Any formal organization can be expected to be a structure built of many small groups, some formally defined, some not; some transient, some persistent. But one might be best advised not to start with the most formal and largest structure of an organization to understand its leadership processes, rather with the small formal and informal groups that exist within that structure. If leadership is understood to begin (emerge) in any setting as someone engages in the combined acts of identifying, defining, and articulating a situation in a way which elicits positively correlative behavior from others in the setting then it may be concluded that the essential political criterion of leadership has been fulfilled. By accepting and acting upon a definition of a situation proffered by someone else some subset of the group has accepted the distribution of values contained therein. That identifies the essential pattern of leadership in its most basic form. The crisis of political representation is not a problem of demand—understood as what citizens expect from leaders—but rather a problem stemming from the difficulties of the leaders. That is why we should rethink the leadership model. We need to prepare our politicians not only in ethical and moral values and in management capabilities, but also in understanding the world. We must also help them to fully know themselves; take care of themselves; and prepare mentally, emotionally, and physically for the hyper-demanding task of ruling without losing touch with their humanity, thus reducing the risk of Hubris Syndrome. Ultimately, leadership needs to be understood as more than a transient political process since leadership as an ongoing social process performs the vital functions of maintaining or redefining a social system’s linkages among its past, present, and future. Only rarely should social systems be understood to rely for their continuation on a single individual playing the leader role. Specific acts of leadership may be necessary but rarely will they be sufficient. Social systems will survive and prosper, decline and fail as the web of leadership is woven from the emergent acts of their members. Visual perspective can be trained, but it can also be worked on from the content we consume through different dimensions.