The Politics of Leadership

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The greatest leaders are students of leadership. They grow their influence by becoming experts in their craft. Additionally, they develop more leaders by sharing what they’ve learned with others. As Historian Henry Adams once said, “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” In practice, leaders, particularly political leaders, navigate formal institutional processes as well as fluid societal spaces. Political leaders’ bases of social power in this dynamic context must be balanced intricately with their roles in formal institutional spaces. However, the exchange of influence between leaders and followers in both spaces are rarely in sync. It may be helpful to return to basics in understanding what should be meant by the use of the term “political.” As Peter Corning put it in his powerful analysis, The Synergism Hypothesis: A Theory of Progressive Evolution: “…political systems include the subset of all imaginable cybernetic systems that are social organizations of some sort. Thus politics is not at heart a separate and specialized sphere of social life; it is an aspect or dimension of all organized social life” (Corning 1984, 6). Or, again from Corning, “…politics is not an epiphenomenon, not a distillate of economic activities, or of the class struggle, or of the machinations of ambitious leaders. Politics is a natural and necessary process of social life, a process that occurs when two or more individuals come together to work out a shared problem or to coordinate their efforts toward some shared goal, such as raising children or making war” (Corning 1984, 7).

a fine analysis and a mine of information that should be in all libraries, particularly on booklists on leadership. . .’ Additionally, this type of leader is specifically focused on multiplying leaders at all levels in the organization. By demonstrating company values, being a mentor, and offering leadership and development opportunities, they increase their influence organically by putting those around them first. Inspire and Motivate

Course overview

House and Aditya have made a substantial case for both the achievements and the difficulties of leadership studies and noted that one of the major problems is that the “current study of leadership … continues to focus excessively on superior-subordinate relationships to the exclusion of several functions that leaders perform and to the exclusion of organizational and environmental variables that are crucial to effective leadership performance” (House and Aditya 1997, 465). They also assert that there are generic leadership functions which “represent broad classes of specific leader behaviors” (House and Aditya 1997, 449). The idea is that a generic function can be enacted by diverse behaviors in different settings, e.g., group maintenance may be seen as such a generic function which is performed by leaders in most, if not all, settings. The notion of generic functions is useful if not applied too selectively. After all, the same role may be served in different cultures by different behavior. The variety of behavior that serves the political nature of leadership will not deny the fact that a fundamental function (it may best be called a metafunction) of all leadership, regardless of setting, is to be political. Once this step is taken, it may become more possible to identify the behaviors which serve that metafunction.

There is also abundant evidence on the usefulness of meditation as a practice that helps in self-knowledge, connection with the present, mental health, and reduction of stress and anxiety, among many other benefits. Barbara Tuchman asked how good human beings are at leading us in her book March of Folly, telling us: “A remarkable phenomenon throughout history beyond place or period is the execution of policies from governments that are contrary to their own interests. Humanity, it would seem, performs worse on government than on almost any other human activity. In this realm, wisdom, defined as the exercise of judgment based on experience, common sense, and available information, is less operative and more thwarted than it should be.” 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. Using a nutrition analogy and our body’s diet, the cell phone is today a portal to our digital life. This digital being coexists with our biological being, but the difference is that since it is a much more recent phenomenon, how its use impacts individuals has not been studied in depth.Successful leaders can persuade individuals about the need and advantages of authoritative change. The change cycle can, consequently, be easily completed. Maintain Discipline:

I here suggest four primary theoretical assertions which hold that leadership (1) is always, in every case, a political phenomenon; (2) is a phenomenon which is necessary but not necessarily sufficient to group syntality (the various performances exhibited by the group in an effort to achieve a goal); (3) may best be approached as an emergent and contingent process phenomenon within all social systems; and (4) within any given social system, in particular as its complexity increases beyond the most primitive levels, leadership roles and functions will be distributed among and circulate in kind, degree, and character among the actors within the system. Again, all social systems are explicitly understood also to be political systems, whether formal or informal, implicit or explicit, in nature. Nearly all organizations will be understood to have multiple leadership actors and performances within them which may or may not coincide with their formal, institutional structure. Leadership, thus, may be treated as a political role-process, or pattern, that occurs at many points, and often concurrently, within any social system. All these issues feed and complement each other and offer different ways to help leaders be more connected with their humanity and with their emotions and, thus, be more effective in their role and more sustainable in the long term.I also looked for experiences in the business world, where there are many biographies and a large amount of content dedicated to rethinking how human capital is organized and how it is developed. It is clearly seen there how the old vertical and pyramidal corporate model is being overcome by a more horizontal and collaborative leadership. Today’s most dynamic companies invest time and resources thinking about these issues, something very difficult to find in the world of politics. Another Pandemic: A Crisis of Leadership and Representation