On Leadership
I will probably have more entries on Leadership after this. I find it an interesting and useful topic. I found the below notes in my diary from 1999. I unfortunately did not note down the references for the notes. Perhaps they are from discussions led by Jerry Greenberg, our former CEO, who visited our office in San Francisco very frequently at the time. It is equally likely to be from a book that I may have been reading at the time. I have expanded my notes based on discussions with Tayyba.
What is leadership?
The description of leadership that I find the most accurate and useful is as follows:
Leadership is an activity – not a style, not a skill, and not a birth-character. It is the activity of influencing a community to face its challenges, and to mobilize the community to surmount these challenges through motivation, organization and focusing attention.
Leadership has two key requirements. First, it requires orchestrating conflicts among and within communities, focusing on how to strengthen the bonds that join the stakeholders together as a team so that they withstand the stresses of problem solving - which stakeholders have to adjust their ways to make progress on the problem, how should the issues be sequenced, what vantage points are required to clarify a complex situation?
Second, leadership requires articulating a shared vision that is relevant to the interests, concerns and perspectives of the community, rather than stating an abstract goal to rally behind. This includes being able to say what’s in it for them – “the why” – and often “the how”. This is critical for effective mobilization.
