Karlshochschule International University

What is Leadership?

Autor: Prof. Dr. Lutz Becker am 7.08.2009

First of all, there is no perfect answer to this question, or at least not a satisfactory or simple one.

My co-editors, Professor Walter Gora and Professor Johannes Ehrhardt, and I have been exploring various aspects of leadership for years. In our book series “Die Neue Führungskunst – The New Art of Leadership” we have collected and developed a broad range of leadership theories, perspectives, patterns and practices. However the more we work on the subject in collaboration with economists, psychologists, medical scientists and practitioners from various industries, politics and public bodies, the more convinced we are – it is almost impossible to find a constiutive theory or even a satisfactory definition of what we call leadership. The simple reason is the complexity of human and organizational behaviour.

Nevertheless there is something we can call “leadership”. And this phenomenon is obviously a critical issue for organizations, both in business and society. An organization without leadership is almost inconceivable. Just imagine – what would remain of our societal organizations if leadership vanished into thin air?

Establishing hierarchies and having something like leadership has obviously always been beneficial to human evolution. Some individuals were able to acquire more resources than others and could share these with others. Resources that provided power, synchronized group behaviour and ensured followership.

In a first step this led to hierarchies and societal differentiation. Nevertheless the structural view on leadership is only a single static perspective.

In the process of evolution humans learned to tell stories and communicate blueprints of the future. They learned to acquire and direct followers by stimulating desires or threatening with existential threats and demise. Here is where strategic leadership begins and management definitely ends.

Abraham Zaleznik was one of the first authors to distinguish management from leadership. Zaleznik believed that leaders were creative and interested in entire systems while managers were focused on processes – they looked at how things were done, but did not question the things that were done. According to Zalesnik leaders promoted new directions, while managers executed the existing ones.

Or from the point of view of John P. Kotter, leadership establishes direction, aligns, motivates and inspires people to produce change, while management relies on planning and budgeting, organization and staffing, controlling and problem-solving to produce a degree of predictability, order and short-term results for the shareholders. Unfortunately, he says, the emphasis on management has often been institutionalised in corporate cultures that discourage people from learning how to lead.

True leadership is about dealing with new conditions, uncertainty, ambiguity and change. In stable situations, there is no need for leadership – it’s just management or administration that is required.

The bottom line of this is that leadership and its goals and definitions have to be subject to permanent change. The graduate students in our Master’s Program in Leadership should not expect recipes, check lists or pre-packed solutions for leadership.

Our Master’s Program in Leadership should be seen as an intellectual journey. A journey facilitating a wide range of perspectives and discoveries concerning human and organizational behaviour, change, innovation, intercultural communication, diversity, leadership and followership. A journey forcing all of us to question and challenge all the things we believe to be given or true. The ability to do this characterizes true mastery in leadership.