Wrapping it Up!: You Don't Know What Leadership is OR How We Got Here! It's History Pt 2

Pt 2 of 2, this episode wraps up the discussion about the foundational meaning and eras of leadership, the past 160 years.

Transcript

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We need better leaders. We need more people who care about people. We need more people who genuinely intend to carry out the missions they have committed to. Missions that bring out the better side of our humanity. Missions that heal and missions that impact. Are you one of those better leaders? Or do you know someone who is? Or have you lost hope in us having better leaders? Or are you simply curious if it could still be possible? I'm here starting a conversation with you so we can go on a journey together to actually answer these questions. And whatever conclusion you come to, at least you will know what is and what isn't worth leading. As a reminder, this podcast is for people who are hesitant about leadership, who've lost hope in leadership, who are curious about leadership, who are former leaders and you're looking back in hindsight about your experiences, or if you're a current leader and you're just making some adjustments. Regardless of the reason why you're here, feel free to join the conversation at any time. There are resources available for this podcast. Please visit worthleadingpodcast.com. It is a centralized place for episode access, for resources like citations, uh, to support this whole podcast. Also, journal entries that I'm writing to reflect on recording these podcasts as well. You can send me a message from there, contact me, anything. So visit worthleading podcasts.com if you want to dig deeper into content for this. So let's get started on today's episode. So today's episode is a part two of the part one of defining leadership. Now, last time, one of the reflections that I had about the previous episode is that it was too dense with information, and I felt like I was just reading and listing things. That's what it felt like. I don't want to do that this time. I am adapting and adopting a new approach for this episode. I am gonna give you the core concepts up front and see if we can go through it uh quickly and succinctly and with clarity so that you can get what you need to define leadership, get some meat on the bones of this whole idea of leadership, and so that the next episode we can say, hey, yeah, I want to lead, I don't want to lead, or I was right about getting into leadership or not. So let's do that this time. I don't know if I will include, I'm actually I'm not gonna include the details as far as the different countries like I did last time, but it will be available on the website as a resource expanded if you want citations, if you want resources for how was leadership during this era in East Asia or the Middle East and North Africa. I will put that on the website so you can still have access to that information. But I find or I found that just listing all these things, you know, trying to pile it up onto the podcast was just way too much. So I'm not gonna talk about the global stuff as much here, but if you want an expansion of it, it's on the website. So global stuff was just mentioned in the first episode of part one episode of this. Let's get started. So quickly rehash what the definition of leadership is. We went to Miriam Webster. Leadership is the office or position of a leader, the capacity to lead, meaning the competence, fitness, aptitude, skill to lead, the act of leading, and you need to have some followers. That's what we said the definition was. Okay. There are four major areas of leadership that have happened in the past 160 years or so. We have the great man era, which happened like between the 1840s and the early 1900s. We have the behavioral and situational models that were in the early 1900s to the 1970s. We have transformational and relational models that happened in leadership between 1978 and like the 2000s. Then we had more recently, you know, this is the COVID era, the digital distributed and AI-shaped leadership models. So we're gonna go over the last three because we spent time last time in the Great Man era, the great man era. As you remember, I started storytelling about it and kind of building the idea of what was really going on when the great man era happened. That was like industrialization was happening, railroads were being built, you had these empires expanding, you had leaders like uh generals, monarchs, industrialists, and stuff like that. That was the great man era. We talked about it, and the core and the key uh theory that happened at the time was the trait theory. And we talked about trait theory, and we talked about how it was uh this idea that it was hereditary for people to be leaders. There was these great men. Uh, we talked about uh Carlisle, Thomas Carlisle, and how he he pushed this theory that it really was a special type of man, not worker, not woman, but specific type of man in power that had the capacity to lead. But now we're going into behavioral and situational models. So I am going to set the stage for that. So 1900s, 1970s, you have this is when we're having world wars, right? World wars begin. World War I, World War II. You have the factory. Uh, factory is like, you know, we're building, we're may we're manufacturing things in the early 1900s, and this is where leadership is happening. Um, there's a lot of reshuffle as far as roles going on in in the world. One, because all the men, or a big chunk of the men who weren't able to get out of wartime, uh, they're fighting. They're out dying, they're fighting. You got women who are entering into the workforce en masse. And um now this whole concept of managing is more so more a discipline now. It's in textbooks, you're starting to get people who are consultants and digging into like uh on a more scholarly level, or graduate programs about leadership. People are not, it's not just these sovereign leaders anymore. You actually have legitimate supervisors. And so um, depending on who these supervisors are, they're gonna lead differently depending on where they are. Uh, it's not so much a focus of who you are, but what you're doing and when you're doing it. So during this behavioral and situational model era of the 1900s and 1970s, you have some core frameworks that came out. And this is when this trait theory is starting to decline. All right. This concept of trait theory is declining, and we have these other managerial frameworks that are coming about. Some of the manageri frameworks are like managerial grid, situational leadership, contingency theory. And I'll go over these really quickly. So for the managerial grid framework, you have this brought about and developed by Robert Blake, uh Jane Moulton. And essentially, it's this model of leadership that has different styles to it. Um, but it really is more so this concern or focus of leadership styles based on a concern for people and a concern for production. You know, we talked about, you know, these factories, this factory concept is up or started. So concern for people and production comes up with this managerial grid um idea. And um then, you know, and and you know, you you see this on an access view, like like you have this production x-axis going on, okay, how much production do we have, and this y-axis of people, you know, in relation to it going, and you're like looking at the relationship between these two, high and low. Okay. Situational leadership theory. So you have a situational leadership model uh that was created by uh Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard, and so they they developed this while they are working on uh their textbook, actual textbook, a management of organizational behavior. Essentially, initially they were, you know, approaching it as a life cycle theory of leadership, but they eventually named it, renamed it as situational leadership. And so essentially, this whole concept, this theory is that the most effective leadership style is really contingent upon the situation, and that people who are successful at leadership, they have to tailor their approach to the actual maturity of the followers that they have and the situation. So you're looking and evaluating these specific things, like how mature are the people who are following me and what's the situation. And so leaders who are able to adapt to this are more successful, and that's what their uh theory was for that. Lastly, you have the contingency theory, and the contingency theory was brought about uh by uh psychologist Fred Fielder, and it really came from a dissatisfaction for him with earlier management theories. I understand, Fred. Uh and um essentially he says uh at the time that there's like there's not one best style of leadership, and it really is an effective leader is based on how well that leadership or that leader can match their style to the situation. Uh and that uh the previous models, it was like, okay, leader style is fixed and it can't be changed, but Fred is like, nah, you're successful if you can adapt, you're successful if you can change your style to match the situation. And so that is why it's contingent upon the situation right there. So those are core theories or frameworks that happen during the time for this era of behavioral and situational models. Let's move on, let's go to a different phase. So the third phase of leadership, we have transformational relational models 1978 to the 2000s. And really, during this era, we have the transformational leadership uh model coming about. This trans concept of transformational leadership came about by uh James McGregor Burns. And he defined it as when one or more persons engage with others in a way that leaders and followers raise each other to higher levels of motivation and morality. So this is more so about not just going somewhere, but elevating uh movement, the elevating the movement of the leader, elevating the movement of the follower. And yes, it is a time where we're getting this word follower more used. This concept of having a follower comes about. This actually, the timing of this transformational leadership framework actually happened in, you know, in uh 19 the late 1970s. Um 1970s, we got early 1980s coming about. And really, you know, Burns is the one that brings up this transformational transformational leadership concept, but you actually have someone called Bernard Bass in the 1980s, 19 like 1985s, he extended on Burns' work and really dug into this concept of followers, followership. That's when it really expanded. And this concept of followership, you know, elevating followers' needs and motivations and values that came about because of uh Bass's extension of McGregor uh Burns work. So we have that transform transformational leadership. This transformational period, because guess what? I did not talk about what was happening at the time. During this time, um setting the stage on the back end, you had the Cold War. You had the Cold War winding down, globalization was accelerating. Uh a lot of corporations are were expanding. They were going past their, you know, this is multinational now, growing past their own borders. Uh, the workforce was more educated, more diverse. And really, people are less willing to comply just because you have a title. Uh, managers were discovering that the whole idea of this hierarchy of just command and control uh and getting compliance and not commitment was not the thing. Um, so that is really a big reason why this whole idea of followers and not leaders was changing. People weren't really tolerating it much as much, you know. Uh people were not tolerating just doing it because I said so. You do it because I said so. You do it because I am in charge. People weren't buying that. And this happened many decades ago. What is it, 2026? And so you're talking about really right now, we're like 30, 40, you know, 50 years into this whole idea of follower being priority. All right. So we talked about transformational and relational models. Okay, so last era. Now I am gonna set the stage first for this. So the last era is what we are in. Okay, okay, we've gotten past COVID, but this is when COVID started. So we got the global pandemic. It just absolutely emptied out offices overnight. So we're dealing with two 2020s, early 2020s to 2026. I can't believe it's been like six years already. That's crazy. Wow. Okay, back to it. So offices are empty. Really, it's it's wild, but everybody just pretty much started using Zoom at a time. I don't know when your first time was using Zoom, but I I I had to use Zoom before COVID started, but it was just like all of a sudden, globally, everyone decided, okay, we're using Zoom. So Zoom is like this infrastructure that we're using. Uh, teams are across time zones. Um, and there are teams that haven't shared a physical room anymore. Like teams are starting who have not seen each other in person now. Leaders are managing people they haven't met in person. They are starting to have to learn to navigate like digital tools, these AI tools even create you know, emails, look, look at performance. How do you analyze someone's performance you've never met in person? Um, and so you're as a leader starting to have to deal with tools like this, get insights um faster than you've ever done it before. Like, oh my goodness, okay, how do I deal deal with this? These um old like ideas or signals of authority have dissipated. Like, you don't have the corner office, you you know, this firm handshake. And I remember when I was in business, okay. I'm not gonna digress. I was like, I remember when I was in business school and the handshake was important, the business suit was important, the the physical presence. This has disappeared, totally disappeared. And so the currency of leadership in the 2000s to 26s is it's trust, it's communication, it's the ability to give people a reason to engage from behind the screen. Oh gosh, the hard part. I'm telling you, this has been hard for me to understand, and I have been adapting, but this is the stage that we're we're in now, and this is the stage of leadership. So when you're talking about now in this era, the type of uh theories and frameworks, we have a few more. So really we're dealing with distributed leadership, collaborative leadership, um, shared leadership now. So when you're talking about distributed leadership in this era, this digital era, um, it it really comes from this concept that because of this spread out nature of interaction and and this is coming from Spillane, um JP Spillane, Halverson, and Diamond. You this whole concept of being in one place has disappeared, and it's and and they say that really you have to see your practice as a leader as stretched out over social and situational concepts. And it's not just a function of your ability, your skill, your charisma, you know, your intellect or anything like that. You have to see it as part of the broader function of social and situational concepts. And so this whole theory really kind of implies it's a reconceptualization of leadership as a practice and seeing as a uh interdependent, it's interdependent uh with interactions rather than the individual. Um yeah, it's a product of interactions now, and so then you have collaborative leadership. And so you have collaborative leadership being brought up by uh a person called Rosabeth Cantor, Moss Cantor. And this whole concept is that organizations um increasingly rely on informal networks and shared problem solving rather than this hierarchical can control. So now we're more so thinking about shared problem solving, informal networks, um, and that leadership itself is a collaborative effort in taking away this hierarchical top-down approach. You also have shared leadership, and shared leadership is coming about more so with piercing and hunger. And so with this whole idea of peer, there's this idea that leadership is defined as dynamic, as interactive, um, and has an influence focused process among individuals and groups. And so the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organizational goals, or both. And so now We've gone from the top all the way to the top down to like just really just spreading this whole concept of leadership to the team itself. I mean, you really don't have a hierarchy much anymore. And so the shared leadership is a really big thing. And now these are these eras of leadership and their core theories. I went over them. Got a little spread out at the end, but I did go over these concepts. So now that we have these four areas of leadership, the key theories that were in each of them, the setting the stage of everything is done. Think about where you are now. How do you view leadership for yourself? Which one of these theories were important to you? Did you find that you lean towards one era over the other? When did you start thinking about leadership in that way? Did you have a mentor? Did you have a model? Did you have something that you gleaned from that got you focused on leading in the way that you did? That's really that's really interesting. Which one of these is more like your leadership style? Or if you've never been a leader before and you joined this podcast because you saw leadership and you didn't like it, or you were curious about it, or lost hope in it from external view, which one of these leadership eras or even theories within the the eras is more like what you agree to, which is more interesting to you, which one is more relevant to you? Think about that. Wow, we did it. That was a lot, but I truly believe, and self-reflecting on this episode, even though it got a little wonky, maybe at the end, I believe this was better than the second episode of me doing the list. Let me know if it was better than the second episode. I hope it was. My goal every single time I get on this podcast is to really improve, continuously improve, reflect on what I'm doing, make it better, make it more interesting, and continue this conversation with you. So let me know how you feel about it. I enjoyed this, it was fun, it was interesting. So I'll talk to you soon. Until next time. And in this, your courage is activated. And with this courage, you can choose to lead. Choose to lead something worth leading. Choose to lead something worth doing. Choose to lead something worth giving your best in rest with your humanity. You can lead. Till next time. It's worth leading.