Where the Leadership Theory Went Wrong

October 16, 2007

To grasp how dramatically we have moved in our thinking on leadership from Machiavelli and Hamilton, it is helpful to see how the words “leader” and “leadership” in everyday language have acquired an inherently positive bias. Consider Lawrence Summers’s speech when he assumed the presidency of Harvard University in 2001: “In this new century, nothing will matter more than the education of future leaders.”Harvard’s “Statement of Values,” published in August 2002, picks up this same optimism when it says that the university “aspires…to prepare individuals for life, work, and leadership.” In both cases, the words “leader” and “leadership” have been transformed from their Hamiltonian sense. Of course, Harvard is not alone in equating the word “leader” with outstanding human qualities. Yale president Richard Levin claims that the university’s goal is to become truly global by “educating leaders.” As we have already seen, most popular books on business leadership also equate the term with good leadership, and many books on political leadership follow suit.

The start of the transformation of leadership into something overwhelmingly positive can be traced in part to James MacGregor Burns. A biographer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Burns is a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and political scientist of impeccable repute. In 1978, Burns published Leadership, an analysis and distillation of what he had learned about the subject in his lifelong study of politics. The book had a major impact both because of Burns’s stature and because it appeared just before the teaching and study of leadership began its rapid growth. In it, Burns differentiated between “leaders,” who by definition take the motives and goals of followers into account, and lesser mortals whom he labeled “power wielders.”

Burns’s position was uncompromising: “Power wielders may treat people as things. Leaders may not.” Burns’s definition of leadership continues to dominate the field. For example, in the 2003 introduction to his widely read book On Becoming a Leader, Warren Bennis restates the position he took when the book first came out in 1989: Leaders create shared meaning, have a distinctive voice, have the capacity to adapt, and have integrity. In other words, for both Bennis and Burns – and indeed for most of their colleagues – to be a leader is, by definition, to be benevolent.

At about the same time as Burns’s book appeared, another group of leadership theorists, led by Abraham Zaleznik, a psychoanalyst on the faculty of Harvard Business School, started to draw a distinction between “leaders” and “managers.” In this construction, the leader is an inspirational and aspirational figure, while the manager handles the duller tasks of administration and maintains organizational discipline. (Zaleznik’s classic HBR article,“Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” is reprinted in this issue.) But by casting the leader in such a heroic light, these leadership theorists only strengthened the confusion between leadership and goodness.

Some leaders achieve great things by capitalizing on the dark sides of their souls.

Business gurus were as much responding to market forces as propounding a new doctrine. During the last 25 years, the leadership field developed primarily in response to the needs of American corporations, which by the mid-1970s were running into trouble. As Rosabeth Moss Kanter put it in her book The Change Masters, published in 1983,“Not long ago,American companies seemed to control the world in which they operated.” Now, she said, they are in a much scarier place, in which the control of oil by OPEC, foreign competition (then primarily from Japan), inflation, and regulation “disturb the smooth workings of corporate machines and threaten to overwhelm us.” In response to this growing concern, American companies turned to business schools for concrete help in fixing what was wrong, and it is around this time that the leadership industry may be said to have begun in earnest. In 1982, funds were pledged to Harvard Business School to endow the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, and there are now similar leadership chairs at other universities, including Columbia and the University of Michigan.

The fact that the contemporary leadership field is an American product – an American seed planted in American soil and harvested by American scholars, educators, and consultants – has profound implications for how we understand leaders. For one thing, current views of leaders have taken on aspects of the American national character. In particular, the positive thinking that infuses our national spirit finds its way into our leadership training.So, too,does the American dedication to self-improvement.

Almost without exception, America’s most popular leaders have personified this sense of possibility. Ronald Reagan captured the sentiment during one of the 1980 presidential debates. Evoking Thomas Paine and John Winthrop, he declared: “I believe…together we can begin the world over again. We can meet our destiny – and that destiny is to build a land here that will be, for all mankind, a shining city on a hill.”

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