Leaders and followers: which kind are you? (OT article)

I feel a rant coming on. So please feel free to change the channel, leave the room, or ask me to chill. But the article you've linked is blinded by its own conceptual flaw. Your comment in your fourth paragraph captures the way things are in real life IMHO ... I quote your words: " I personally have some issues with pigeonholing people in this way"

I agree with your comment. My problem is, having sat through way too many "training" sessions run by corporate dunderheads and the consultants and experts whose snake-oil they are obtuse enough to pay good money for, the entire concept of leadership is little more than a self-congratulatory smoke screen thrown up by self-anointed leaders. There are just so many more possibilities than "leader" or "follower." And I submit that anyone who studies to be a leader is almost certainly not one.

In the simplest alternative world there is a third possibility--those who choose to neither lead nor follow. These people are all around us and may be poets, painters, musicians, luthiers, bird watchers, sociopaths, and others who don't want or need to fit into a leader-follower model.

The possibilities are actually much more subtle. Because there are people who are followed who may not want or deserve to be followed -- e.g., shamans, hermits, monks. And there are people who should be followed even though they are not followed -- e.g., shamans, hermits, monks.

Sorry for the rant. But I am just so happy to never again have to sit in on a two or three day training session led my someone who is reading from a script or spewing this year's buzz-words. I will always remember sitting in a conference room in the 1980s being badgered with watered down and misrepresented notions of "paradigm shifts" and "Copernican inversions." These notions, obvious to anyone who read them in college in the 1970s, were corporatized distortions lifted from Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Given a decade or two, any good idea can be reduced to pablum by a training department.

I remember a little poem I learned in Sunday School:

Do not walk in front of me,
For I will not follow.
Do not walk behind me,
For I will not lead.

Just get the *#&@! away from me!

Andrew

I don't believe things have to be either or.

I neither lead nor follow, I march contently to my own beat, always have, always will, like it or not, I march onward.

(lol) I'm with Andrew on this one.

Labels are just a way to pidgin hole others. It makes life easier, but static…its genesis is laziness. " He who labels me , negates me"….Soren Keirgagaard. We all follow and lead…ya know the whole swapping the roles of particles, so as to gain truth.

Who's holding the GPS?

I was reading that and waiting for the PCa tie-in. I expected to see something along the lines of "those in the active leader quadrant were found to have higher T-levels and X% increased chance of a PCa diagnosis by age 50." Nope.

Jeff

My wife has led me around for nearly 30 years so I guess I am a follower. :D

81,
This has been an interest of mine since grad school when I assisted a Prof doing a study of what makes some managers rise to top management instead of middle management. He had tens of thousands middle managers and top managers exactly matched to social class, education and ethnic background to see what factors were the difference. What he found was exactly the same that McClenman found at Harvard in the 1950s. The prime difference between a successful manager and others is the "power motive", better described as the motive to influence others as opposed to the need to be liked, social needs or the need for achievement (do things better faster".
In business I was fist exposed to this at Mattel where they had an in-house course on McClennan"s
power, affiliation and achievement motives. I never took the course, but worked for managers that did and they were head and shoulders above those who did not take motives into consideration when leading. I took the course about 10 years later and ever since have require that all my managers take it. You basically manage someone and hire people for positions by recognizing the motives that drive them. You don't hire an person high in affiliation for a job that necessitates firing people or making tough decisions. You can't train an athlete to high performance regardless of his ability unless he has a high achievement motive.
In short you can't properly manage someone if you don't know what their prime motivators are. If you hire someone without understanding their basic motivators you will most likely hire unsuccessful people or put them in jobs they are not suited for psychologically.
As with all research the theory must be predictive and this is the problem with most management theories I have been exposed to. Mcclennan could accurately predict the performance of a company or a department by simply looking at the prime motives of its managers and conversely accurately predict the motives of managers by simply looking at a company or department's performance.
In my consulting business I have had the chance to work with hundreds of companies and can tell with a short talk with the manager exactly how the company is being managed just by identifying what motivates him. This goes across foreign, cultural and gender differences.
It's not the task that is important, but the motive behind the task. For example, three individuals come to work on a Saturday. One person does it because all his friends are working or he feels his boss will like him if he works on Saturday, (affiliation motive). Another comes in because he is behind in his tasks and feels uncomfortable unless he is caught up, (achievement motive). the third comes in because he wants a promotion to get ahead so he can be in a position to change things, (power motive). Knowing what motivates a person is very helpful in being able to manage him to get the best performance from him while also meeting his basic psychological needs.

JohnT, I get that concept, and I agree. I digress, however, on the concept that those who are motivated by power are necessarily good leaders. The question here, as I understood it, was about the characteristics of leaders and leadership.

Some with power are good leaders, and some are not. I agree with the idea that defining leadership is tough. We can recognize it when we see it, but we can't always say what brings it about. There are highly successful people out there, who think they are leading, when they are actually in front of a mob that is chasing them with pitchforks.