A few years ago I wrote about what I termed the expansive executive and distinguished between the desirable case and the extreme case (Kaplan, 1990, 1991; Kaplan, Drath, & Kofodimos, 1992). This forerunner of the idea of forceful leadership was much more fully developed at that stage than was the precursor to enabling leadership.
Once this opposition of forceful and enabling leadership crystallized in my mind, I developed with help from my colleagues a draft instrument for measuring it. This report is based on the quantitative data from our early use of this instrument as well as the qualitative data from our service work.
In treating the notion of forceful versus enabling, I do not for a moment regard it as constituting all of leadership. I do, however, think that understanding it is important if we are to improve the effectiveness of leadership as it is practiced today.
Introduction
What is the goal of management development? The obvious answer is: to make managers more effective. But how do we define effectiveness? Everyone—managers and students of management alike—has an opinion, some more informed than others. There is no one way to define leadership effectiveness, but I have found it helpful to think about it broadly as versatility. The objective of management development, then, is to help equip managers to handle a wider variety of situations.
To get beyond this general definition I will explore what versatility means in terms of two approaches to leadership that I have found to be prevalent in my work with executives: forceful and enabling.
I am not the first to observe these two approaches. In fact, there is a long-running controversy about which is better. In one camp are people who hold that being enabling, or empowering, is the way to go. Gaining strength since World War II (and expressed in such terms as participative leadership and Theory Y), this idea of leadership came into great favor in the last ten years as organizations mounted a collective effort to improve quality, innovate, and stay competitive. In the other camp are people who, partly in reaction to the empowerment movement, hold that strong individual leadership is critical, especially when fundamental change is needed.
Which approach is better? Which do we want an individual leader to take, especially the senior leader? The answer, perhaps obvious, is that it is a mistake to choose. Allowing for the fact that any individual will tend to favor or specialize in one or the other, both approaches are required of the senior leader. In the face of the varied and ever-changing demands on managers, especially senior managers, versatility is the name of the game.
Let me emphasize: Versatility is a range of diverse capabilities, not a nondescript, shapeless blend.
Total versatility may not be attainable, at least by most managers. Even if it were attainable, we do not know for certain whether total versatility is synonymous with ultimate effectiveness. Managers who favor one approach over the other may be more effective in certain conditions. My work with executives has convinced me, however, that managers who emphasize one to the point of sacrificing the other put themselves and their organizations at risk.
Managers face a number of obstacles in the pursuit of greater versatility. The root of the word versatility means “to turn around” or “to pivot.” What limits a person’s range of movement, managerially speaking, is the same thing that stands in his or her way of becoming more versatile. And it is not just lack of skills. It is also attitude. Managers who depend too much on one approach to leadership must overcome negative feelings about the other approach. In extreme cases, a manager can have an aversion to the other. The word aversion, with the same root as versatility, means literally to “turn away from.”
Although the distinction between forceful and enabling leadership is not new, it can, if looked at in the proper way and in the proper context, be surprisingly useful. In this report I will discuss the way the idea actually plays out in senior managers. In doing so, I will inquire into the emotional basis for executive leadership and how emotions are engaged when executives try to develop, or even think about developing.
The Tension Between Forceful and Enabling
In the past, when executives and students of management made the distinction between a forceful and an enabling approach to leadership, their tendency was to oppose the two or to place one at a disadvantage. The widely used terms autocratic and participative, for example, leave no doubt which is the more desirable.
The same is true of “Theory X” and “Theory Y,” as conceptualized by Douglas McGregor (1960). This highly normative dichotomy captured the imagination of academics and practicing managers alike and has had great staying power in the field. What McGregor did brilliantly was expose the fallacious thinking behind heavy-handed leadership. Theory X is a set of assumptions about human nature that holds that the average person doesn’t like to work and avoids responsibility, and therefore must be directed and even coerced into getting his or her work done. Hence, forceful leadership is required.
If Theory X sets up a negative self-fulfilling prophecy, Theory Y does the opposite. It assumes that the average person is perfectly willing to work hard and take responsibility if the work is at all interesting and if he or she is treated like an adult and not like a child. The idea is to replace a vicious cycle with a virtuous cycle.
McGregor’s model of leadership is a carefully reasoned polemic against overcontrol. He has much company today in people who look askance at what they regard as the traditional command-and-control model of leadership.
There are, however, people who have serious misgivings about empowerment and its de-emphasis on the power of the person in charge. Abraham Zaleznik regards the contemporary preference for empowering leadership as part of the American love affair with fraternal leadership—with leader as brother. In a 1989 book subtitled Restoring Leadership in Business, he argued that strong, charismatic leadership is critical to organizational effectiveness, and contended that “personal influence is leadership,” as long as it is not self-serving (p. 237). In fact, the democratic ethos that sprang up in U.S. organizations in the 1980s, thanks in part to the quality movement featuring employee involvement and teamwork, seems to have resulted in a backlash by people who feel that decentralization and cooperative processes have been overdone.
I have worked with some executives who feel this way. One such individual, whose company had pushed quality for ten years with considerable success, decried the muffling effects of a strong orientation toward process.
This company has gotten caught up in the bad, terrible part of process, which implies lack of edge, lack of accountability, lack of consequences, lack of responsibility. And when you focus so much on process, you tend to forget the role of personality and leadership.
Personality to this executive means the sort of aggressive, charismatic leadership that Zaleznik calls for.
To another executive I worked with, leadership means sharp definition.
This corporation needs people with more of an edge, more of a bite. A whiff of brutal clarity, if it’s based on reality, is an essential component of leadership.
This executive is also an advocate of periodic drastic change to maintain a company’s competitive position. And,
if you have a change agenda, you have to overweight the agenda to get it going. You have to overweight it since you’re up against inertial tendencies. That’s where passionate energy and leadership are required.
To “overweight” is to apply force, to be forceful.
Some are particularly critical of fellow executives who in their view go overboard in the effort to create favorable conditions for their people. One complained: “This corporation is full of round-worded, nice people who don’t make a change.” Another characterization I’ve heard is “go-along.” Or “get-along, go-along.” What concerns the individuals delivering this critique is that “feel-good” comes at the expense of taking the tough action necessary to make organizations operate effectively, which of course in the long run is