Google the term “leadership” and also the search will return 360 million results. This staggeringly high number points out one “truism” about leadership – it is a subject about which much happens to be said and written.
A short survey of perhaps the first page of Web results will reveal that there are nearly as many opinions about them of leadership as you will find people talking about it. Among the reasons for having leadership that I often strikes me within the three decades that We have centered on this issue is the fact that, despite the fact that a great deal has been said for so long on leadership (one of many earliest writers on leadership was Plato who lived between 424 to 348 B.C.!), there seems to be no one commonly accepted definition of what leadership really is.
And yet, clearly, leadership is very important to us. As humans, we search for leadership, “know it once we see it”, and depend on it to thrive and succeed in so many settings, be it in work, school, or civil society as a whole.
While there is no one accepted definition, detailed behavioral description, or methodology to see and train leaders, it’s worth knowing the general schools of thought on which leadership is and how it works.
The full scope and number of leadership theories can’t be summarized without some degree of simplification and exclusion, but my historical research (and personal views – more on this later) on the subject of leadership lend itself to four broad categories:
1. Trait theories – leadership is dependant on a cluster of individual attributes or traits
2. Style theories – there are multiple how to lead and each approach is comprised of a group of behaviors that comprise the style
3. Situational theories – based on the indisputable fact that effective leadership is totally based on context, and that no single optimal psychological profile of a leader exists
4. Contingency theories – centered on an amalgam of this three previous theories, contingency theories suggest that effective leaders should and do adopt different styles dependant on the specific situation
Nearly three decades ago, during my days as a corporate executive, I probably fell into the first camp, believing that leadership was simply a collection of certain traits that one people had and other people didn’t. But through the years, my views about the subject have changed.
In working with executives, entrepreneurs, coaches, and teams of all types, my business partner Gary Jordan and I are finding all these approaches to be incomplete when seen as “the answer” to leadership. That’s why it’s so important to explore all these theories, as well as a procedure for the topic that has proven most useful to us in aiding people develop their natural leadership skills.
But first, you can easily gain lots of insight into the niche by simply asking yourself a few pre-determined questions, on the basis of the truth of your personal experiences:
Is leadership inborn? (Do certain people have it, yet others don’t?) Can leadership be learned? Can different types of people be leaders in numerous ways?
Do certain situations make leaders out of anyone? And do different situations call for different types of leadership skills?
Assess your answers to those questions, after which we will begin exploring the theories.
