As indicated in my post of August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)
The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.
The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.
Today’s leadership literacy classics are still all About Leadership. Though the authors’ names might well be unfamiliar, they are nevertheless two of the most influential 20th- century thought leaders, specifically on leadership. The first is Mary Parker Follett, the second is James MacGregor Burns.
Follett was a rare bird. A woman who a hundred years ago wrote about power and authority – and whose writings were widely read! She was a pioneer in the study of leadership and management, specifically in American business. But whereas years later leadership luminary Peter Drucker referred to her as “the prophet of management,” in the decades after her death (in 1933) her name was all but forgotten. Withal, by now her work is highly respected and she herself widely admired for, as one expert put it, telling “truths about human behavior that stand the test of time.” Her far sight and foresight are testified to here by an excerpt that focuses, as I think such work must, not only on leaders but on followers.
Burns’s book titled simply, Leadership, is a foundational text. Foundational for what he would have called leadership studies, and for what I have argued has become an industry, the leadership industry. The book’s appearance, in 1978, galvanized a small but highly dedicated group of scholars (me included) into believing that the study of leadership could legitimately be at the center of their professional lives. To frame his contribution as he, for all his modesty, might have, Burns was an “intellectual leader.” A leader who dealt with “both analytical and normative ideas” and who brought both to bear on his environment.” He was not “detached from his social milieu.” Rather he sought to change it.
— From Mary Parker Follett, The Essentials of Leadership, 1933.
I have said that the leader must understand the situation, must see it as a whole, must see the inter-relations of all the parts. He must do more than this. He must see the evolving situation, the developing situation. His wisdom, his judgment, is used not on a situation that is stationary, but on one that is changing all the time….
And now let me speak to you for a moment of something which seems to me of the utmost importance, but which has been far too little considered, and that is the part of the followers in the leadership situation. Their part is not merely to follow, they have a very active part to play and that is to keep the leader in control of a situation. Let us not think that we are either leaders or – nothing of much importance.
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— From James MacGregor Burns, Leadership, 1978.
The interaction [between leader and follower] takes two fundamentally different forms. The first I will call transactional leadership…. Such leadership occurs when one person takes the initiative in making contact with others for the purpose of an exchange of valued things. The exchange could be economic or political or psychological in nature….
Contrast this with transforming leadership. Such leadership occurs when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leader and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality [as with Gandhi] …. Transcending leadership is dynamic leadership in the sense that the leaders throw themselves into a relationship with followers who will feel elevated by it and often become more active themselves, thereby creating new cadres of leaders.