The issues dominating our news cycles for the past weeks and months show clearly that at every level of our society—personal, institutional, political, and cultural—there is work to be done.
In the midst of the fight against COVID-19 and conversations about division and racial injustice and police brutality are questions about leadership and action. How will we do this work? Who gets to have a voice in the process? What do transparency and accountability look like? What makes an effective leader?
Leadership is worth studying because it helps us answer some of these questions. An examination of what effective leadership is and what it ought to look like in practice expands our capacity to see new paths forward that avoid the pitfalls of the past.
Let's look at common concepts about leadership and explore a theory of leadership that emphasizes building consensus in relational and participatory ways.
Distinguishing between Leadership and Management
Many leadership programs and many people around the world talk about leadership when they really mean management. Management is the mainstream conceptualization of the phenomenon of leadership, but although complementary, the two concepts are completely distinct.
Management is a vertical approach based on position, with power accumulated at the top of the hierarchy.
Leadership is a relational disposition based on legitimacy, credibility, and trust.
Common Leadership Styles
Classic approaches to leadership philosophy are centered around the “heroic” leader. This mainstream perspective on leadership focuses on accumulation of power in the leader at the top and assumes that only a few people can be leaders or be involved in leadership. Many people have internalized this version of leadership and are either perpetuating toxic power structures or undervaluing their own ability to be a leader based on their misconceptions of what it means to lead.
Studying leadership must involve confronting and deconstructing cultural conceptions of leadership and re-establishing a new framework within which human beings work together to create value and achieve goals.
There are other popular leadership styles, including but not limited to:
Charismatic Leadership: a concept of leadership built around the charisma and persuasive power of a leader. This model of leadership relies on the force of a leader’s personality to motivate others and to effect change.
Transformational Leadership: a leadership model where the leader and their team challenge and support each other to greater and greater levels of integrity and performance. Transformational leaders lead primarily through example, working side by side with their team to achieve goals and to keep morale high.
Servant Leadership: this approach to leadership inverts the heroic or charismatic leadership model and makes the primary goal of the leader the service of those on their team. The servant leader focuses on clearing obstacles and empowering the people on their team so that their team can take on big things.
Adaptive Leadership: this model of leadership focuses on taking on change as a collective team, evolving and growing in the midst of disruption and change. This philosophy of leadership focuses on taking a team from one level of performance or response to challenge to the next. It can be understood both collectively or individually.
Critical Leadership Studies
However, the different leadership styles explored above are still very leader-centered. At USD SOLES, we teach critical leadership studies (CLS), a more collective approach to leadership. We also emphasize indigenous perspectives of leadership that go beyond the Western canon and that are also characterized for being more collective and participatory perspectives.
Critical leadership studies focuses on the ways in which leadership emerges in a shared, distributed, and relational way within a particular context, and redefines leadership as a process that can be enacted collectively and that is not the responsibility of a chosen few.
Leadership Studies at USD SOLES
In the USD SOLES Master’s in Leadership Studies program, we have embraced critical leadership studies because no one individual, organization, or country is capable of addressing the main challenges of today’s shared-power world. We need to move away from traditional ‘heroic’ conceptions of leaders to instead acknowledge that leadership requires that people work across sectors and boundaries to find common solutions.
This is a more collective, horizontal, participatory, transparent, and democratic way of conceptualizing leadership. This approach to leadership also has the capacity to address today’s complex problems in a way that is more connected with a commitment to radical racial and social justice.
Interested in learning how to be a great leader? View our comprehensive guide and discover how a Master's in Leadership Studies can transform your personal and professional life.
