Mapping the New World of Leadership

by Richard Louv
January 2002

The second in a series of essays on leadership from Leadership for a Changing World, a program of the Ford Foundation in partnership with the Advocacy Institute and the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University.

See Also: Co-producing Knowledge January 2002 The Hidden Leaders July 2001

Leadership has fallen on dismal days. So goes the fashionable wisdom. But take another look. Just beyond the political arena, from the neighborhoods and barrios, small towns and big cities, a new style of leadership is emerging. It’s coming in under the radar. And it’s going to change America.

The true nature of this new leadership is still something of a mystery.

In April 2001, the National Conference for Community and Justice (previously known as The National Conference for Christians and Jews), held its first national meeting on the issue of leadership. During a panel discussion, several San Diegans were asked to discuss their perception of leadership. These were folks from various sectors of society -- a school district superintendent, a minister from a major African American church, a business executive, a community college president, a journalist and others.

We struggled. One after another, the panel members spoke in hesitant platitudes about the personality characteristics of leaders. "A leader must have courage." “A leader should have charisma.” And so on. Oddly, few of the people on the panel would have attributed such attributes to themselves. As the panel droned on, two audience members nodded off.

"What we're talking about is celebrity, not leadership - and just possibly leadership has more to do with relationships than personality." Suddenly the audience snapped awake.

Suddenly the discussion turned. A panel member said, “What we’re talking about is celebrity, not leadership – and just possibly leadership has more to do with relationships than personality.” Suddenly the audience snapped awake. They seemed hungry for more of this, eager to move beyond the celebrity-focus that dominates our cultures’ definition of leadership. They’re not alone.

Just maybe, we’ve been looking for leadership in all the wrong places.

The devil is in the definition – how we conceptualize leadership. That’s the position taken by Sonia Ospina, associate professor of public administration at New York University and Ellen Schall, Martin Cherkasky Professor of Health Policy and Management, also at NYU. Ospina and Schall are among a small number of academic researchers studying how Americans conceptualize leadership. They’re also launching a major study of grassroots leaders who have not received much media attention but have managed to transform their own communities.

"We're undergoing a big shift in the way people conceptualize leadership, even though many of the pioneers don't think of what they're doing as leadership because they're still measuring themselves by older definitions," says Ospina

“We’re undergoing a big shift in the way people conceptualize leadership, even though many of the pioneers don’t think of what they’re doing as leadership because they’re still measuring themselves by older definitions,” says Ospina. In a recent paper on the topic, Ospina and Schall write: “There is a sense among some in our country today that we are lacking inspirational leaders….Yet a closer look reveals that all over the nation groups of concerned citizens are working together, often at the local level, to solve tough social problems. These are the new leaders in America today.”

To understand where leadership is headed, you have to know where it’s been.

Looked at one way, America seems to be a vast, leaderless wasteland. This view is not new. In the l830s, many Americans mourned the passing of the founding generation – Jefferson, Franklin and all the others – and suggested (in a refrain familiar today) that the nation “would never see their like again,” says Michael Schudson, University of California sociologist and author of "The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life.”

Europeans also took a dim view of American leadership. In l888, British ambassador James Bryce published his famous treatise, ‘Why Great Men Are Not Chosen Presidents.’” As Bryce saw it, America lacked a strong civil service class or a European-style aristocratic tradition, which drew men of wealth and leisure to politics. Rather, Americans were recruited into political leadership through what Bryce considered corrupt party politics. Nonetheless, James Bryce – and his fellow aristocrats – didn’t anticipate the strength and vitality of American leadership in the century to come or the coming failures of European leadership.

In the wake of Watergate, social critics once again argued that the country was suffering a leadership drought. In 1975, political theorist Benjamin Barber declared that 1945 had been a pivotal year, when modern American leadership began to erode. "There are today no leaders, only heads of factions; there is no leadership of ideas, only a competition of ideologies; there is no consensus, only an unstable balance of opposing interests,” Barber claimed. This charge “might have been written (and probably was) in any decade of our history,” according to Schudson.

But what constitutes leadership? As Schudson points out, such concepts change over time. Schudson describes how our interpretation of citizenship has evolved from the "citizenship of trust" (i.e., faith in the King); to the "citizenship of party" (Whig, Republican, Democrat, whatever); to a "citizenship of information" (thinking more for ourselves); and finally to a "citizenship of rights." "The first three stages of citizenship are still alive and well. But with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the fourth stage really took hold," says Schudson. In this fourth stage, aggrieved citizens don't wait for government to make things right or to avenge our oppressors; they use the courts. "Just as we have a duty to vote, we have a responsibility to guard our own rights -- and hopefully the rights of others -- through the judicial process."

Like citizenship, leadership has always been more a complex, interesting and evolving phenomenon than the conventional interpretation would have it. For decades, political and management literature about the nature of leadership has focused on individual traits, styles, and behaviors that characterize the leader – especially the “great man” (and sometimes the “great woman”) who works within a traditional, hierarchical system, solving everyone else’s problems.

This is an oddly undemocratic way to view leadership.

Media and politicians have amplified this definition. In addition, they have confused community leadership with the daily acts of good citizens. For example, the “thousand points of light” metaphor, which suggests that that if each of us does our part to volunteer, to mentor, to adopt a school, then everything will be fine. But true systemic change requires something far more powerful than stars in the sky or candles in the wind, however pretty those images may be.

Over the past two decades, an alternative vision of leadership has slowly come into focus. John W. Gardner, a member of Lyndon Johnson’s cabinet and founder of the citizen action organization Common Cause, began to write about leadership in a profoundly different way -- one that examines the symbiotic relationship among members of a community and its leadership.

“All citizens should have the opportunity to be active, but all will not respond,” according to Gardner. “Those who do respond carry the burden of our free society. I call them the Responsibles. They exist in every segment of the community—ethnic groups, labor unions, neighborhood associations, businesses—but they rarely form an effective network of responsibility because they don’t know one another across segments. They must find each other, learn to communicate, and find common ground. Then they can function as the keepers of the long-term agenda.”

Other thinkers have also articulated a different approach to community leadership. Political scientist James MacGregor Burns introduced the idea of “transforming leadership” which occurs when " one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality." He dismissed charisma as a concept that collapses under close analysis, and that leadership is not confined to politics – but is expressed by so-called ordinary people in their own communities.

Joseph C. Rost, a professor at the University of San Diego asserted that the study of leadership in the 20th century has been dominated by industrial thinking, framing leadership as “management oriented…goal-achievement-dominated, self-interested and individualistic in outlook, male-oriented, utilitarian and materialistic in ethical perspective, rationalistic, technocratic, linear, quantitative and scientific in language and methodology.”

And he offered a strikingly different list of emerging values for the post-industrial 21st century, among them: “collaboration, common good, global concern, diversity and pluralism in structures and participation, client orientation, civic virtues, freedom of expression in all organizations, critical dialogue, qualitative language and methodologies, substantive justice, and consensus-oriented policy-making process”

Some might dismiss such a list of leadership values as hopelessly idealistic. But not Wilfred H. Drath, who, with the Center for Creative Leadership, focuses on practical business leadership. He argues that business will soon find such values more effective in an increasingly diverse and interdependent global economy. And, he says, business could learn a thing or two from the grassroots social change agencies practicing the new, collaborative leadership.

"I see extraordinary creativity at the grassroots," Gardner says today. "I see new modes of collaboration and conflict resolution, new ways of bringing social agencies, private foundations, neighborhood people, business and government to the same table."

But what precisely does this leadership look like? Are we simply replacing one set of platitudes for another?

As exciting as some of the alternative theory is, the literature remains thin. In 1999, Schudson chaired the University of Pennsylvania’s National Commission on Culture, Society and Community's leadership subcommittee. The experience was illuminating, he says, not because of what was brought to light, but by what remained in the shadows. Studying the copious literature on leadership, he found it strangely incomplete. “We raised more questions than we answered,” he says. Frustrated with the thinness of the research, the commission disbanded.

The Ford Foundation, partnering with NYU and the Advocacy Institute in Washington D.C., recognizes outstanding community’s leaders or leadership groups, those doing transformative work just beyond the media spotlight. Ford’s “Leadership for a Changing World” program offers substantial financial resources to the nation’s hidden leaders. In coming years, as part of the program, Schall, Ospina, their academic team – and the awardees themselves -- will study and attempt to define the nature and processes of this new leadership, extending the scholarship of John Gardner and others.

"I see extraordinary creativity at the grassroots,” Gardner says today. “I see new modes of collaboration and conflict resolution, new ways of bringing social agencies, private foundations, neighborhood people, business and government to the same table. There’s a new world out there."

It’s time to chart the new world.

Richard Louv is the author of several books about community life in America. As a consultant to Leadership For A Changing World, he is researching philosophies, histories and examples of community leadership. He can be reached at www.richardlouv.com.

Copyright © 2001 Advocacy Institute