The Art of Leadership

#theartofleadership.

Leadership might better be considered as an art rather than a science, or, more specifically, as an ensemble of arts. Under this approach, we might consider how four particular arts mirror four of the central features of leadership: the invention of identity, the formulation of a strategic vision, the construction of organizational tactics, and the deployment of persuasive mechanisms to ensure followers actually follow. In summary, leadership is critically concerned with establishing and coordinating the relationships between four things: the who, the what, the how and the why:

? Who are you?—An identity.

? What does the organization want to achieve?—A strategic vision.

? How will they achieve this?—Organizational tactics.

? Why should followers want to embody the identity, pursue the strategic vision, and adopt the organizational tactics?—Persuasive communication.?

Science may help the leader and the organization achieve these but fundamentally they are all subjective issues and are better considered as various arts.

? Identity is constructed out of the amorphous baggage of myth and the contested resources of history; it is not a reflection of the world but the construction of it. It is rooted in the philosopher's stone, not the scientist's microscope.

? Strategic visions are designed through the imagination, not the experiment, they are the equivalent of the fine arts, not physics, for they involve imagination rather than experimentation, they are paintings, not photographs.

? Organizational tactics are rather better envisaged as martial arts than mathematics, for here the leader must evaluate the organizational forms and manoeuvres suitable for the competition and must take account of the likely indeterminacy of outcome.

? Persuasive communication can certainly be supplemented by scientific knowledge, but fundamentally this is the world of the performing arts, the theatre of rhetorical skill, of negotiating skills, and of inducing the audience to believe in the world you paint with words and props.