What if Genghis Khan had gone to college?
I pose the question because many colleges now offer courses in “leadership,” and I’m wondering: could Genghis have profited from those?
Or Napoleon, for that matter? What distinguishes a Napoleon Bonaparte from a Billy-Bob Bonaparte? Can the quality be packaged into a course? You know what I’m thinking:
Could I (with the proper schooling) .. be the next Napoleon?
Age-old quest
People have long wondered if there were techniques one could learn to become a great leader. Books like Machiavelli’s The Prince provided cynical advice for how to wield power successfully, advice that was positively. . . um, Machiavellian. But these books didn’t tell you how to become a leader-type if you weren’t one already.
In the 19th century, sociologists launched systematic studies of leadership in their quest to understand organizations. Their inquiries bubbled along for decades, but they went pretty much unnoticed by anyone outside academia.
Then in the 1960s the real world crashed into the ivory tower. Disenfranchised groups of every stripe demanded access to power. Gates were grudgingly opened.
But opening gates wasn’t enough, as it turned out. There was also something in the excluded groups themselves that held them back from taking charge. Feminists, for example, saw a need for “assertiveness training workshops” to restore a trait that society had suppressed in women. Analogous programs sprouted for African Americans and other minorities. All of this ferment soon exposed an inconvenient fact: no one really knew what made leaders leaderly.
It was then that a century of academic interest in the subject acquired new relevance. Out of this interaction between social need and sociological research came a new discipline known as leadership studies.
Before this time, American universities had offered leadership training only incidentally in the form of “campus activities.” Prospective leaders cut their teeth in college by going into student government or organizing frat parties.
By the late eighties, however, over 600 colleges and universities were offering formal leadership courses, and soon courses of this type proliferated throughout and beyond the universities. Today, corporations sponsor countless workshops for executives and managers. Every sizable city has development centers for aspiring civic leaders. In America, the state department, the military, the CIA, and many other branches of government have programs of their own. Leadership is widely treated as a subject to be taught and learned, just like medicine or law or ancient Sanskrit poetry. But…
What is a leader?
The simplicity of the question is deceptive.
Is a leader “a person who runs things?” No, that’s a boss.
And although every leader may in some sense be a boss, every boss is certainly not a leader.
The irreducible minimum definition of a leader is “someone with followers,” but that bare bones formulation begs the question: Why do some people (and not others) attract followers?
History has seen a parade of theories. Sociologist Max Weber speculated that leadership involves a mysterious force that some people are just born with, which he called charisma. But what charisma was, or how to get some, if you didn’t have any, Weber couldn’t tell you.
Some have said leadership isn’t in a person but in a whole situation and how any given person fits into it. A leader in one context might be a loser in another. This theory would say the French Revolution created Napoleon, and if Genghis Khan were transported to a modern American university, he wouldn’t be in the student senate, he’d be in jail (perhaps after organizing some frat parties).
In fact, given the right situation, according to this view, anyone can be a leader. Picture, for example, a group hiking through the woods. If they meet a bear, the short, weak, stupid, cowardly guy might well be the first to do the right thing and bolt, followed by the others, making him suddenly—briefly—the leader!
Leadership theorists often discriminate between power, authority, and leadership. A man with a gun has power, but that’s not leadership. A supervisor has authority, but that’s not leadership either.
Leaders don’t push, they pull. They don’t enforce, they inspire. Leaders lead, which implies a destination, someplace to be that isn’t here. They attract followers by flashing a light ahead, and starting in that direction and radiating conviction about going that way.
The corporate world bristles with seminars and workshops that purport to teach leadership, but what they actually teach is management.
Managers don’t start things, they keep things going. Management is a content area, like medicine. Anyone can see that practicing medicine requires expert knowledge. If we don’t have medical schools, we won’t have doctors. But if we don’t have leadership schools, we’ll still have leaders, because humans clump into groups and follow someone; that’s our nature.
What a leader does, fundamentally, is get many individuals to operate as some single entity. A leader does this by articulating a vision that strikes a chord and builds a narrative that people believe in and feel themselves to be a part of. All the specific mechanisms of leadership may go into achieving this: charisma’s in there, favorable personality traits play a part, a conducive situation is an ingredient…
Before the fact, however, if an aspiring leader were to ask a teacher how to forge some vague milling mass of separate individuals into a cohesive group united by a great purpose, the answer would reside in a vision yet to be articulated. In that sense, leadership is like poetry. Can you teach people to be poets? Yeah, sort of. You can improve their language skills, build their vocabulary, teach them about rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration, show them great poems others have written… all this will enable the poet in them to emerge and shine—if they have a poet in them.