Stephen Billing’s Blog

Research that claims that leadership disappears when it is examined. This disappearing act raises the question as to whether there is such a things as leadership at all.

Alvesson and Sveningsson conduct leadership research in which they attempt to avoid the problem of constructing leadership through the process of developing a questionnaire and then getting respondents to answer it.

What they do instead is interview managers/leaders using open questions and ask the managers to describe their leadership in their own terms.

In their article The Great Disappearing Act: Difficulties in Doing "Leadership," Alvesson and Sveningsson’s analysis of the responses is illuminating. The main thing that the responses have in common is the confusing and incoherent picture they paint of what it is they consider leadership to be.

Each manager starts with a statement of what they consider important in leadership, and, perhaps not surprisingly, these statements reflect current fashions in leadership – maintaining the vision, promoting the team, working with key team members, harnessing the energy and so on. One manager who appears to be relatively sophisticated even says leadership is about managing meaning. Although he then says that he is rarely able to find the time to spend with his people because operational issues tend to take priority.

Managers I speak often reflect the same concerns, saying they don’t have time to do the leadership aspects of their roles.

After each manager/leader had said what they considered important (vision/values/team etc) a curious thing happened when the researchers then asked them to describe the most important leadership activities in more detail.  This is where the responses started to get confusing and incoherent.

The researchers described this as being the disappearance of leadership. They identified the following tactics that leaders used in explaining leadership, the result being that leadership undergoes a disappearing act.

• Pointing at what they saw as the crucial issue in leadership, and then being vague and contradictory about how to tackle it.
• Stating the obvious as a uniting vision (e.g. where the vision is simply the function of the business unit such as "providing infrastructure")  and then living the vision through improving social relations.
• Limiting one’s role to presenting ideas and then letting the others decide. The researchers call this minimilastic influencing.
• Stating one leadership principle is crucial and then contradicting it in practice.
• Doing primarily things other than those stated as being crucial, and largely being absent from influencing.

 These things are very different from what most authors on leadership would advocate – typically, an active person trying ambitiously to exercise influence within an asymmetric relation.

Conclusion

As part of my consulting practice I am often concerned with leadership in organisations. This study certainly reinforces my own experience of discussing leadership with those in formal and informal leadership positions.

Leaders always find it difficult to pinpoint what it is that they do that can be classified as "leadership." I find myself in the same boat, wrestling with the question of how to describe what my own practice is, a practice that includes leadership. 

Is it the inadequacy of words to describe the concept of leadership, or is it that there really is no such thing as leadership after all? Or is there some other explanation?