By Sujit Mundul

When considering management in the decade of 1990s, three important observations could be made: The massive efforts made to change the way organizations operate, the astonishing degree of failure that accompanies all but a handful of such attempts, and the radical aversion to risk-taking. One might think that the high degree of failure has provided us with a mountain of data to understand the causes. This is a correct assumption. In the same breath, one might also contemplate that the data load enables us to predict a successful route to change; but this is probably wrong. We know why change goes wrong, but we find it enormously difficult to make changes work.

 

The problem of change is especially significant now. Because as we see management and organizations in the western world appear to be in a state of constant turmoil as change follows change in an ever more frantic attempt to reverse what it took two centuries to construct. The traditional methods of organizing business including public services, no longer seem viable.

 

It is possible that organizations are really autistic; in other words, organizations rather than their leaders are unable or unwilling to listen to what others are saying to them. Perhaps, their strategic intentions are rolled out irrespective of the advice that is being offered to them. In this context, one could possibly agree that IBM went through a phase of being an autistic organization, as its market share crumbed and its leadership continued to exercise the less than successful strategy despite internal and external criticism and advice that the company was going wrong.

 

Keith Grant in his famous article “Managing Change through Commitment” mentioned:

 

“Now that we have uncovered some possible benefits and disadvantages with commitment as a panacea for change … I want to consider the extent to which leadership can displace the problematic fuzziness of subordinates with a transparent way forward”.

 

Let us now focus on the significance of leadership rather than change. These two very often appear to be linked: leadership in itself implies change. So, let us look at the significance that different contemporary theories attribute to leadership. In traditional models, leaders are the critical sine qua non, but some current approaches attribute very little to leadership, or reconstruct the meaning of the term to change the entire debate. Leadership is amongst the most perspective areas of management knowledge.

 

Despite an enormous outpouring of material during the second half of the twentieth century, we appear to be little closer to understanding leadership than either Plato or Sun Tzu, who began the written debate several thousand years ago. Since post-war period it appears that we have gone full circle: From assurances that personality traits were the key, though equally valid counter argument that the situation was critical, to a controversy over whether the leader was person or task-oriented, and back to finding out the charismatics whose visions and transformational style would explain all (Bryman 1992). During this latter period there has been a prescriptive urge to push leadership in an empowering direction so that Super Leadership (Manz and Sims, 1991) can ensure that Leaders work to free up the skills and potentials of their subordinate rather than throttle initiative in bureaucratic and functional hierarchies. Now, let us touch upon a different aspect of leadership: Personality. More importantly, stable personality. When we see the boss sacking an employee for some minor mistake we know just how hard–hearted she is; when she brings her baby to work she seems quite different, almost pleasant. Keith Grant has cited another example when someone reveals her school report it is quite difficult to imagine the “shrinking violet of 2b” against the assertive CEO now standing before us. Yet, according to another colleague, she isn’t assertive at all, but downright aggressive. Could she be all these things to different people? Could it be that there is no solid centre here, no core characteristics that remain unchanged across time and space? Or perhaps, it is the people who interact with her, who construct the character? If this is so, is there no essential “essence” to people, but merely a character that is constructed through various relationships? Which characterization prevails over time tends to depend upon who has the power to reproduce it; thus accounts of popular figures may change with each biography! Indeed, a difficult proposition. 

 

The concept of Deep Leadership suggests that leadership processes and practices, not roles are critical; that leadership is deeply and systematically present throughout all levels of the organization and not just at the formal top of the hierarchy; and that the fixation with formal leaders or Shallow Leadership and not informal or Deep Leadership is also rooted in an epistemological approach that perceives leadership to be only the effect of leaders and never the consequence of followers. It may be that leadership is an ineffective phenomenon in terms of the survival of organizations as population ecology models suggest or that leadership is merely the requirement of normative pressures as institutional theory suggests or that it is merely a myth whose purpose is to ensure the survival of the leaders themselves (Gemmill and Oakly, 1992).

 

The approach towards Deep Leadership also seeks to examine the extent to which individuals who are regarded as being leader whether formal or informal are able to affect and effect their own version of events. It might be, for instance, that the crucial difference between leadership and non-leadership does not lie in the particular act or process, but in the ability of some individual to prevail over others. Another question comes up: Is leadership rather like history just the acts of victors? It may even be that acts of Deep Leadership are indeed identical at all levels but only formally recognized where they oincide with formal authority. Or alternatively, it may be that leadership styles and processes do differ between the levels of hierarchy so that there are qualitative differences between the leadership in the shop-floor and the leadership in the boardroom.  

 (Mundul is a Director with Standard Chartered Bank Nepal Ltd)