Leadership is a subject that has been written and talked about for thousands of years, and yet there’s very little general agreement on what leadership actually is. In the first installment of this ongoing series on the subject, master coach Lynda-Ross Vega offers insight into the different schools of thought on the subject, as well as some critical questions for anyone interested in leadership.
Google the word “leadership” and the search will return 360 million results. This staggeringly large number points out one “truism” about leadership – it is a topic about which much has been said and written.
A brief survey of even the first page of Web results will reveal that there are nearly as many opinions on the subject of leadership as there are people talking about it. One of the things about leadership that I often strikes me in the 30 years that I have focused on the topic is that, despite the fact that so much has been said for so long on leadership (one of the earliest writers on leadership was Plato who lived between 424 to 348 B.C.!), there seems to be no one commonly accepted definition of what leadership actually is.
And yet, clearly, leadership is important to us. As humans, we seek out leadership, “know it when we see it”, and rely on it to thrive and succeed in so many settings, be it in work, school, or civil society in general.
While there is no one accepted definition, detailed behavioral description, or methodology to discover and train leaders, it’s worth understanding the general schools of thought on what leadership is and how it works.
The full scope and range of leadership theories can’t be summarized without some degree of simplification and exclusion, but my historical research (and personal views – more on this later) on the subject of leadership lend itself to four broad categories:
1. Trait theories – leadership is based on a cluster of individual attributes or traits
2. Style theories – there are multiple ways to lead and each approach consists of a group of behaviors that define the style
3. Situational theories – based on the idea that effective leadership is completely based on context, and that no single optimal psychological profile of a leader exists
4. Contingency theories – based on an amalgam of the three previous theories, contingency theories propose that effective leaders should and do adopt different styles depending upon the situation
Nearly three decades ago, during my days as a corporate executive, I probably fell into the first camp, believing that leadership was simply a collection of certain traits that certain people had and other people didn’t. But over the years, my views on the subject have changed.
In working with executives, entrepreneurs, coaches, and teams of all types, my business partner Gary Jordan and I have found each of these approaches to be incomplete when viewed as “the answer” to leadership. That’s why it’s so important to explore each of these theories, in addition to an approach to the subject that has proven most useful to us in helping people develop their natural leadership skills.
But first, you can gain a lot of insight into the subject just by asking yourself a few questions, based on the truth of your own experiences:
Is leadership inborn? (Do certain people have it, and others don’t?) Can leadership be learned? Can different types of people be leaders in different ways?
Do certain situations make leaders out of anyone? And do different situations call for different types of leadership skills?
Assess your answers to those questions, and then we will begin exploring the theories.
Exceptional, or Well Rounded? How Your Natural Talents Get Lost in the Shuffle
Imagine a world where ducks are forced to spend all their time learning to run, and squirrels fail to develop their natural climbing abilities because they have to spend so much time in remedial swimming classes. In some ways, this silly world is our world – a world where our natural talents often get lost in the shuffle in the effort to become “well rounded.” But it doesn't have to be that way.
Leadership: Does the Situation Matter?
Are certain people ‘born leaders’, or is leadership all about context? The situational theory of leadership holds that the situation is the defining factor in what type of leader will arise. In this article, master coach Lynda-Ross Vega explores the strengths and weaknesses of this approach.
Leadership: Is It All About Style?
Style theories of leadership hold that different leaders fit different categories based on the ways that they lead others in accomplishing a goal. Here, master coach Lynda-Ross Vega takes a look at some of the strengths and weaknesses associated with this approach.
