What Is Leadership?
The Leader–Follower Relationship

“Leadership” is wanting to do something new and better, and getting others to go along. This definition applies as much to senior executives developing new strategies, new purposes, and new values as it does to a group member down in the organization suggesting a new way of running a meeting or improving a process to drive better results. Both the word new and the word better remind us that leadership always refers to some task that can be improved and to some group whose values and culture will ultimately determine what is better.

What is new and what is better will always depend on context, the nature of the task, and the cultural values that are operating in the group or organization that is doing the work. What we later may label as “good or effective leadership” thus always begins with someone perceiving a new and better way to do something, an emergent leader. Our focus will be not on the individual and the desired characteristics of that emergent leader, but on the relationships that develop between that person and the potential followers who will have influenced what is finally considered to be new and better and who will implement the new way if they agree to try it. Those potential followers will always be some kind of workgroup or team, so our focus will also be on the relationships between them. They may be co-located or widely spread in a network, and their membership may change, but there will always be some kind of grouping involved, hence group dynamics and group processes will always be intimately involved with leadership.

LEVELS OF RELATIONSHIP

Leader-follower relationships can usefully be differentiated along a continuum of “levels of relationship” that are generally accepted in society, that we have learned to use in our own relationships, and that are, therefore, familiar and comfortable. We introduce these levels now but will explain them in greater detail in Chapter 2. The relationship continuum includes these four levels:

Level Minus 1: Total impersonal domination and coercion

Level 1: Transactional role and rule-based supervision, service, and most forms of “professional” helping relationships

Level 2: Personal cooperative, trusting relationships as in friendships and in effective teams

Level 3: Emotionally intimate total mutual commitments

Some version of these levels is present and well understood in most societies, and we generally know the difference in our own relationships between coercively giving orders to someone over whom we have power (Level Minus 1) and the broad range of transactional relationships we have with strangers, service providers, and our bosses, direct reports, and peers with whom we maintain appropriate “professional distance” (Level 1).

These arm’s-length relationships differ from how we relate to friends and to teammates in collaborative workgroups we have gotten to know as individual human beings (Level 2), and how we relate to our spouses, close friends, and confidants with whom we share our more intimate and private feelings (Level 3).

We already have the attitudes and skills necessary to decide at what level to relate to each other in our daily lives, but have we thought through sufficiently what is the appropriate level of relationship in our workgroups and in our hierarchical relationships? Have we considered what the leadership relationship needs to be as the tasks of organizations become more complex?

In order to explain what we mean by Humble Leadership, we need to consider what these levels mean in the organizational context of today and as we look ahead. Our argument is that Level Minus 1 domination and coercion is a priori morally inappropriate in an established democratic society and is, in any case, ineffective except where tasks are very simple and programmable. Level 1 transactional relationships built around role expectations, and rules of behavior appropriate to those roles, have evolved into what we can think of as the basic managerial culture that still dominates many of our organizations and institutions. It is based on the core US values of individual competitiveness, heroic self-determination, and a concept of work that is linear, machine-like, and based on technical rationality. Level 1, therefore, relies on rules, roles, and the maintenance of appropriate professional distance (Roy, 1970). This existing culture and the way the world is changing lead us to believe that we need a new model based on more personal Level 2, and sometimes even Level 3, relationships and group processes.